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When running on a battery, it is important to know what parts of your circuit draw the most current. Profiling is a process where you look at sections of code or interactions with hardware to see how much power each requires. In this video, James shows four tools (and their tradeoffs) when profiling IoT or Edge Machine Learning devices. See if it makes more sense for you to use a Digital Multimeter (DMM), Power Supply with history graphs, an oscilloscope

Everywhere I look, I see a new device with a microcontroller, some sensors, a battery, and 2.4 GHz radio. All of these things connect to the Internet. It is like the internet is becoming full of these things. (There should be a catchy name for that.)

As a hardware designer, there is always a concern about how much power these devices consume. Modern microcontrollers (and sensors) are very dynamic devices. In other words, they go from sipping nanoamps to hundreds of milliamps in a few microseconds (or faster.) So, slower devices like a DMM may not be fastest enough to measure a device’s current consumption for an accurate view of its full behavior.

In this element14 Presents video, I compare Handheld DMM, Bench DMM, Power Supply (with graphing), Oscilloscope with Current probe, and Source Measurement Units (SMU) for measuring an IoT device’s current consumption. My favorite tool for this activity is the Nordic Power Profilier Kit 2. It is a USB-based SMU designed for measuring the power consumption of IoT devices. The best part is they only cost around $100!

Previously I wrote up why the 9V battery sucks. As I thought more about that post, I realized, I never explained how much energy is in a 9 V battery versus say a couple of AA batteries.

For this post, I am going to break down the energy stored in a 9 V battery, the small rectangular kind and compare it to what you get with 6 AA batteries. Yes, it takes up a little more space, but you might be surprised by the difference.

Smoke detectors beep when their backup battery dies, which always seems to occur in the middle of the night (at least for me.) These backup batteries are usually a small rectangular 9V. They have become popular choices for electronics projects. If you need your Arduino project to last longer than a day, this isn’t the battery you want to use.  Here’s why.

Why is choosing a simple AA battery such a daunting selection process?  Manufacturers are keen on giving their products different names and brag about the chemical technology that makes them up.  However, it is nearly impossible to make package-to-package comparisons of the battery’s capacitor.

Denis Hennessay has a GREAT write up on Measuring Battery Capacity with an Arduino.  In addition to full details on how his project works, Denis even shares the results of several AA batteries.  Nice!