Reinhard Klemm

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9 years, 7 months ago.

nRF51822-mKIT power consumption of the board itself

NORDIC nRF51822-mKIT consumed at least 19mA power (the board itself) with external 3V battery. The current measurement by th pin header shows less then 0,5 mA for the nRF51822 chip itself. Disconnecting from power and interface MCU switch off has no influence on power consumption. So a real test with coin-cell battery makes no sense. Can anybody check this?

Question relating to:

Last updated: 27 Aug 2020
The nRF51822-mKIT is a low cost ARM mbed enabled development board for Bluetooth® Smart designs with the nRF51822 SoC. The kit gives access to all GPIO pins via pin headers …

1 Answer

Andrea Corrado
9 years, 7 months ago.

Did you read the PS that says to cut track for current consumption?

Yes, I cut the solderbridge SB8 and measure the current at P1 pin1 and p2. But the current consumption of the chip is not the problem. I modified the BLE_UART example and used an temperature sensor and all worked fine. Then I disconected the board from PC and tested with battey coin. Then I was astonished - this worked only for 20 minutes, the most time the program was in advertising mode only. That was the reason to check the power consumption. I repeated the measurement with blinky example (LED off 4 sec, LED on 1 sec) an got the same result. Always a current consumption overall more then 20mA.

posted by Reinhard Klemm 26 Sep 2014

I have this issue aswell i'm afraid, measuring the current at P1 i get very low current when running externally, however measuring the current using a shunt resistor with inputs into +- headers i am drawing 20mA regardless of MCU state...

posted by Andrea Corrado 26 Sep 2014