Measuring the Pi Pico W's Power Consumption - Workbench Wednesdays 60

Very good post.

I like the profiler board, it would be very useful in checking out each board you might want to use.

I don't know how intentional it is, but given that the price of toner cartridges is almost the same as the price of a new printer, which comes with toner.....there definitely seems to be profit somewhere in the equation....

I had my eye on one of those for a long time, but they weren’t available when I was in the market. 

Maybe I should try grabbing one now.

GASP! You’re not suggesting printer manufacturers are purposely forcing customers to buy ink/toner before they need it!? 

Frankly, it never occurred to me it was probably just a gated counter. 

(on topic this time)

The Nordic PPK2 is a great lab tool.
For low current measures, I often use a EEVblog µCurrent.

It doesn't come with software. In essence, it turns out a mV for each mA / µA / nA, and you attach a voltmeter to show the results. 
If you have a meter with logging options, you can graph the results.

I've written a custom applications for my Keithley DMM (It runs apps; what a time to be alive) to calculate the amp hours of a low power device over time.

You can also attach a scope and visualise the current. But warning: the device isn't isolated and the current - connector isn't at ground level. Some discretion is required.

In certain situations, it can also be used to amplify a low signal. It 's not a high impedance device though - not unexpected for a fancy current shunt. It loads the test circuit.

Laser toner cartridges typically have significant toner left when the "chip" indicates no toner. I "re-chipped" some cartridges and they suddenly have lots of toner.

Hah. Funny, but related. I use a laser printer. I got it back when I was doing the decals for the Tricorder project.

The other day, the Cyan toner cart ran out. But the others were >30% of capacity.

At first, I thought: "wow. This is just like inkjets. The cart must have shipped almost empty."

Later that day, I started editing a video. THAT is when I remembered that I had also printed out the custom labels for my storage containers (the ones in my background) with it.

Thing is, those labels plus all of the tricorder decals had a grey tint (to hide the white paper.) And, of course, it isn't "grey" but a mixture of black and blue ...

So yeah. I clearly used up the cyan before anything else.

Printing out that first page of the datasheet must have costed you a whole red ink cartridge

Interesting idea. I have an Adafruit’s Feather with the RP2040. I think I have a Xiao coming. I also have a couple of custom boards I made. Which would be interesting because I gave zero thought to low-power on those.

In retrospect, I should have also tried to power the board off the 3v3 rail and not the 5v rail.

Would be interesting to see how this compares to other RP2040 implementations such as Seeed or Adafruit.