Given I've been doing a lot of work recently that involves assessing power consumption, I saw a timely video from Adafruit looking at the Nordic Semiconductor Power Profiler II.
I've been sticking cheap INA219 modules into my various stripboard prototypes and exporting data every minute over MQTT. These are great for broad, macro scale measurements over a long-ish period.
What they can't however do is measure down to the resolution needed to assess how efficient deep sleep is and whether changes to code reduce the time spent transmitting or waiting to receive data over WiFi. The former is very power hungry and must be minimised to save battery. The latter might be tuneable to help.
Professional equipment to do this is really quite expensive. The newly released Power Profiler II kit from Nordic is in the hobbyist friendly price range of ~£100. Mildly extravagant and you could perhaps roll your own but this price point is not ridiculous given the time you'd spend building the tool if you want it to work well. Which is why I've treated myself to my first new tool of 2020.
I've got one of my old macro spreadsheets to analyse for the ESP32-S2 WROOM module, but after that I'll be using the Power Profiler to delve deeper into how much power my prototypes are using and if there's anything I can do to improve this.
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