After the recent battery life estimation and refinement posts, I wanted to create a more permanent and more automated setup for monitoring the total power consumption of JeeNodes. I expect to be repeating these power usage optimizations regularly, with new sketches.

Here’s the idea. A little interface to let one JeeNode (or Arduino, whatever) monitor the power consumption of another. This ought to provide a fairly accurate measurement within a day or so.

First the schematic:

This is a “low-side” current meter. In fact there are two of them in series, one with a 60 mA range, the other with a maximum range of about 1 mA. So this setup can measure up to 60 mA with approximately 1 µA resolution at the lower end. These ranges could easily be changed by adjusting the 5 Ω (2x 10 Ω) and 270 Ω resistors.

The low range resistor has a forward-biased diode, which limits the total voltage drop over it to under about 0.6V. This means that the total voltage drop over the measurement circuit will stay under 1V for currents up to 60 mA. With a 5V supply, that leaves about 4V to be supplied to the JeeNode being tested – more than enough headroom for the 3.3v regulator to do its thing.

Note that there is a drawback to low-side current sensing: the “ground” level supplied to the test circuit isn’t really ground. It’s floating “somewhere” above zero, and what’s worse is that the actual level will depend on the amount of current drawn. But in this case it doesn’t really matter, since the test circuit isn’t connected to anything else anyway (we’re doing all this to measure a battery-power wireless system, after all).

Two op-amps are used to amplify the 0 .. 0.3V signals 10 times. A neat trick: the low range op-amp (on the right) nicely compensates for the floating reference level from the high-range resistor by using that as reference for its negative input. So basically, these two op-amps generate two analog voltages in the total range of 0 .. 3.3V. I picked the OPA2340 CMOS op-amps because they can operate at 3.3V and can output rail-to-rail voltages. They also happen to draw very little current.

Here’s a custom-made JeePlug with all the above components:

Note: I don’t know what got into me while building this plug, but the pins on the port connector are all reversed. So I’m forced to plug this thing in the other way around. Doh!

This is only half the story. Tomorrow: the software side of power tracking.

Update – for a very nice current metering setup, see also David Jones’ µCurrent adapter.