NOTE-NBGL Power consumption

[fbt1]

Hi!, im performing some power consumption analysis from my NOTE-NBGL notecard by using Power Profiler Kit 2 from Nordic Semiconductor. In these initial tests, the notecard’s synchronization mode is set to “minimum” and syncs are automatically triggered by using note.add requests with “max”:5 combined with "sync":true. In addition, a note is added each minute (using a template) so, each 5 minutes a sync is triggered. The power supply for the notecard is provided through the battery connector of a RAK19001 wisblock base board with a RAK4631 core.

The power consumption profile i’m getting for a single note addition is the following, with an average current consumption around 7.3mA …

… and for time between sync triggers, the average current consumption is 2.4mA.

Does these results make sense, according to the expected values from notecard’s specification?. It is possible to reduce the power consumption between sync triggers below the reported value without sleeping the MCU?. Any help will be appreciated.

[zfields]

@fbt1

It is possible to reduce the power consumption between sync triggers below the reported value without sleeping the MCU?.

Hi @fbt1,

Have you tried removing the Notecard and measuring the stand-alone consumption of the host MCU?

The way you have configured the Notecard, we expect the Notecard to be consuming 8uA during the idle period. This leaves me to believe your host MCU is responsible for the remainder of the current consumption.

Perhaps you can try testing without the Notecard, and then again without the host MCU. In this way, we can tell who is responsible for the power draw. Once that is established, then perhaps I can offer better guidance.

Best,

Zak

[fbt1]

Hi @zfields … you are right, i forgot to put the SX1262 LoRa Transceiver into Sleep mode in the MCU. Now the results are much more like expected, giving an average current consumption around 111uA between sync triggers. Thanks a lot.