原创 Tool eases low level current measurement

 2013-2-14 18:32  1834 22 22 分类: 消费电子

Nowadays, it's all about the coulombs. Some products run for years off a single coin cell and any excess electron use will drain that power source prematurely.

If you're building low-power electronics, it's important to be able to measure current consumption, sometimes to very low values. Few digital multimeters (DMMs) can measure much sub-1µA. My Extech 330, for instance, has a 0.1-µA digit but is unsurprisingly inaccurate when presented with a couple of hundreds of nA (nanoamp).

A nA isn't much, but some controllers today claim sleep currents of just tens of nA.

One nifty tool is the µCurrent from EEVblog's Dave Jones. It's a very simple circuit adapter consisting of not much more than a selectable set of shunt resistors and an op amp. You could cobble up your own design in no time, but the µCurrent is inexpensive and well-engineered.

I ordered one since I'm taking a lot of data from some very low-power systems. As the picture shows it's a small box with two switches and four plugs. Put the µCurrent in series with the power supply to your system, and plug a DMM into the two output plugs.

One switch controls power; the other selects one of three ranges. These produce 1 mV/nA to the meter, or 1 mV/µA, or 1 mV/mA. So in the lowest scale a meter reading of 100 mV corresponds to 100 nA.

It's quite accurate and easy to use. Sub-10 nA readings were spot-on and easy to make. That's better than the $400 Fluke 87V DMM (resolution 0.01µA) can do.

There's no out-of-range indication. The op amp saturates at about 1.5V, which is the only clue it's time to change settings. The manual warns that the unit is unfused, and the shunt resistors are teeny little SMT things that will fry easily so one has to be careful not zap it with too much current.

My one beef is that the two input banana plugs don't have the usual holes drilled perpendicular to the posts. My drill press quickly took care of that, because I find those holes tremendously useful. The picture shows a resistor lead going into one of the newly-drilled holes.

1 V going through 30 MOhms reads 33.5 mV, or 33.5 nA,
which is nearly spot-on, accurate to within the tolerance of the resistors.

Dave specs the thing with a 2kHz bandwidth, but I found it gave reasonable results out to 3.5kHz. This is definitely not something to track power consumption of your system on an instruction-by-instruction basis. Or to watch current zoom up when the CPU wakes up for a hundred microseconds. But it's great for understanding static and more slowly-moving events.