Abstract
Measuring the consumption of electronic devices is a difficult and sensitive task. Data acquisition (DAQ) systems are often used to determine such consumption. In theory, measuring energy consumption is straight forward, just by acquiring current and voltage signals we can determine the consumption. However, a number of issues arise when a fine analysis is required. The main problem is that sampling frequencies have to be high enough to detect variations in the assessed signals over time. In that regard, some popular DAQ systems are based on RISC ARM processors for microcontrollers combined with analog-to-digital converters to meet high-frequency acquisition requirements. The efficient use of direct memory access (DMA) modules combined with pipelined processing in a microcontroller allows to improve the sample rate overcoming the processing time and the internal communication protocol limitations. This paper presents a novel approach for high-frequency energy measurement composed of a DMA rate improvement (data acquisition logic), a data processing logic and a low-cost hardware. The contribution of the paper is the combination of a double-buffered signal acquisition mechanism and an algorithm that computes the device’s energy consumption using parallel data processing. The combination of these elements enables a high-frequency (continuous) energy consumption measurement of an electronic device, improving the accuracy and reducing the cost of existing systems. We have validated our approach by measuring the energy consumed by elemental circuits and wireless sensors networks (WSNs) motes. The results indicate that the energy measurement error is less than 5% and that the proposed method is suitable to measure WSN motes even during sleep cycles, enabling a better characterization of their consumption profile.
Highlights
Energy consumption is a critical aspect in the development of electronic circuits
The results presented in this paper show how to obtain a high sample rate Data acquisition (DAQ) system using a pipeline processing composed of an Analog-to-digital converters (ADC), two direct memory access (DMA) channels and a state machine with two timers, minimizing the data loss when the data acquisition process discretizes the current input signal
We propose an approach for analyzing the energy consumption of electronic devices by means of maximizing the sample rate of commercial microcontrollers for adequate data gathering
Summary
Energy consumption is a critical aspect in the development of electronic circuits. One of the priority tasks when designing electronic devices is to know the consumption in order to select the components that supply the energy and to define the compatibility with other devices. The energy consumption is an important characteristic in data sheets and a source of information used to compare devices. Measuring the energy consumption is not an easy task for various reasons. The energy consumption signals often do not have a defined frequency; they are quite random and often they vary very with high frequency, requiring costly measurement devices. These signals contain noise that needs to be filtered. The signals usually have low power, so errors are often introduced when using commercial devices to measure them, e.g., burden voltage
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