Contiki OS CC2538: Reducing current / power consumption - contiki

I am trying to drive down the current consumption of the contiki os running on the CC2538 development kit.
I would like to operate the device from a CR2032 with a run life of 2 years. To achieve this I would need an average current less than 100uA.
However when I run the following at 3V, I get the following results:
contiki/examples/hello-world = 0.4mA - 2mA
contiki/examples/er-rest-example/er-example-client = 27mA
contiki/examples/er-rest-example/er-example-server = 27mA
thingsquare websocket example = 4mA
I have also designed my own target platform based on the cc2538 and get similar results.
I have read the guide at https://github.com/contiki-os/contiki/blob/648d3576a081b84edd33da05a3a973e209835723/platform/cc2538dk/README.md
and have ensured that in the contiki-conf.h file:
- LPM_CONF_ENABLE 1
- LPM_CONF_MAX_PM 2
Can anyone give me some pointers as to how I can get the current down. It would be most appreciated.
Regards,
Shane

How did you measure the current?
You have to be aware that using a basic ampere meter to measure the current consumption of contiki-os wouldn't give you relevant results. The system is turning on/off the radio at a relative high rate (8Hz by default) in order to perform the CCA. This might not be very easy to catch for an ampere meter.
To have an idea of the current consumption when the device is in deep sleep (and then make calculation to determine the averaged current consumption), I'd rather put the device in the PM state before the program reach the infinite while loop. I used the following code to do that:
lpm_enter();
REG(SYS_CTRL_PMCTL) = SYS_CTRL_PMCTL_PM2;
do { asm("wfi"::); } while(0);
leds_on(LEDS_RED); // should not reach here
while(1){
...
On the CC2538, the CCA check consumes about 10-15mA and last approximately 2ms. When the radio transmit a packet, it consume 25mA. Have a look at this post: Contiki UDP packet transmission duration with CC2538.
Furthermore, to save a little more current, turn off the serial com:
#define CC2538_CONF_QUIET 1
Are you using the SmartRF board? If you want to make proper current measurement with this board, you have to remove every jumpers: P486, P487, P411 and P408. Keep only the jumpers of BTN_SEL and the RESET signals.

Related

How can i tell if a peripheral is connected to GPIO?

I want to be able to detect when a peripheral sensor is NOT connected to my Raspberry Pi 3.
For example, if I have a GPIO passive infrared sensor.
I can get all the GPIO ports like this:
PeripheralManagerService manager = new PeripheralManagerService();
List<String> portList = manager.getGpioList();
if (portList.isEmpty()) {
Log.i(TAG, "No GPIO port available on this device.");
} else {
Log.i(TAG, "List of available ports: " + portList);
}
Then I can connect to a port like this:
try {
Gpio pir = new PeripheralManagerService().openGpio("BCM4")
} catch (IOException e) {
// not thrown in the case of an empty pin
}
However even if the pin is empty I can still connect to it (which technically makes sense, as gpio is just binary on or off). There doesn't seem to be any api, and I can't legitimately think of logically how you can differentiate between a pin that has a peripheral sensor connected and one that is "empty".
Therefore at the moment, there is no way for me to assert programmatically that my sensors and circuit is setup correctly.
Any one have any ideas? Is it even possible from a electronics point of view?
Reference docs:
https://developer.android.com/things/sdk/pio/gpio.html
There are lots of ways to do "presence detection" electrically, but nothing that you will find intrinsically in the SoC. You wouldn’t normally ask a GPIO pin if something is attached—it would have no way to tell you that.
Extra GPIO pins are often used to detect if a peripheral is attached to a connector. The plug for some sensor could include a “detect” line that is shorted to ground and pulls the GPIO low when the sensor is attached, for example. USB and SDIO do something similar with some dedicated circuitry in the interface.
You could also build more elaborate detection circuits using things like current sensing, but they would inevitably have to put out a binary signal that you capture through a dedicated GPIO.
This is easier to achieve for serial peripherals, since you can usually send a basic command and verify that you get a response.
Detection using solely the input line can be tough. First, you'd want to narrow the scope of the problem. Treat as not-present the condition of a sensor not being connected, the sensor being connected but not responding, or the sensor responding in an uncharacteristic manner.
So, if it is a digital sensor, then communicating with the sensor may be enough to tell if it is present or not (especially if checksums or parity bits are involved).
Some analog sensors also have specific specs on how it behaves when triggered. You can utilize deviation from those specs to determine if the sensor is not present.
If you have a digital sensor w/o any error checking on it's output, where you clock out data (so all 0s or all 1s is valid) or it's just a binary 1 or 0 for output, then you'd need external help. Same for most analog sensors.
This external help would be something where you put the system in a known controlled state, press a button, and it then checks the sensors for output within a specific range. To be absolutely sure, you'd want at least two different states, to ensure your digital or analog inputs didn't happen to be stuck at the correct state for your test.
Just about any other method would be external to the system. Using additional IO to "detect" a sensor could help increase confidence the sensor is there, but you could get false positives where all you've learned is that "something" is there - not necessarily the sensor you expect.

Data recovery of QFSK signal in GNURadio

I'm pretty new to using GNURadio and I'm having trouble recovering the data from a signal that I've saved into a file. The signal is a carrier frequency of 56KHz with a frequency shift key of +/- 200hz at 600 baud.
So far, I've been able to demodulate the signal that looks similar to the signal I get from the source:
I'm trying to get this into a repeating string of 1s and 0s (the whole telegram is 38 bytes long and it continuously repeats). I've tried to use a clock recovery block in order to have only one byte per sample, but I'm not having much luck. Using the M&M clock recovery block, the whole telegram sometimes comes out correct, but it is not consistent. I've tried to adjust the omega and Mu values, but it doesn't seem to help that much. I've also tried using the Polyphase Clock sync, but I keep getting a runtime error of 'please specify a filter'. Is this asking me to add a tap? what tap would i use?
So I guess my overall question would be: What's the best way to get the telegram out of the demodulated fsk signal?
Again, pretty new at this so please let me know if I've missed something crucial. GNU flow graph below:
You're recovering the bit timing, but you're not recovering the byte boundaries – that needs to happen "one level higher", eg. by a well-known packet format with a defined preamble that you can look for.

FSK demodulation with GNU Radio

I'm trying to demodulate a signal using GNU Radio Companion. The signal is FSK (Frequency-shift keying), with mark and space frequencies at 1200 and 2200 Hz, respectively.
The data in the signal text data generated by a device called GeoStamp Audio. The device generates audio of GPS data fed into it in real time, and it can also decode that audio. I have the decoded text version of the audio for reference.
I have set up a flow graph in GNU Radio (see below), and it runs without error, but with all the variations I've tried, I still can't get the data.
The output of the flow graph should be binary (1s and 0s) that I can later convert to normal text, right?
Is it correct to feed in a wav audio file the way I am?
How can I recover the data from the demodulated signal -- am I missing something in my flow graph?
This is a FFT plot of the wav audio file before demodulation:
This is the result of the scope sink after demodulation (maybe looks promising?):
UPDATE (August 2, 2016): I'm still working on this problem (occasionally), and unfortunately still cannot retrieve the data. The result is a promising-looking string of 1's and 0's, but nothing intelligible.
If anyone has suggestions for figuring out the settings on the Polyphase Clock Sync or Clock Recovery MM blocks, or the gain on the Quad Demod block, I would greatly appreciate it.
Here is one version of an updated flow graph based on Marcus's answer (also trying other versions with polyphase clock recovery):
However, I'm still unable to recover data that makes any sense. The result is a long string of 1's and 0's, but not the right ones. I've tried tweaking nearly all the settings in all the blocks. I thought maybe the clock recovery was off, but I've tried a wide range of values with no improvement.
So, at first sight, my approach here would look something like:
What happens here is that we take the input, shift it in frequency domain so that mark and space are at +-500 Hz, and then use quadrature demod.
"Logically", we can then just make a "sign decision". I'll share the configuration of the Xlating FIR here:
Notice that the signal is first shifted so that the center frequency (middle between 2200 and 1200 Hz) ends up at 0Hz, and then filtered by a low pass (gain = 1.0, Stopband starts at 1 kHz, Passband ends at 1 kHz - 400 Hz = 600 Hz). At this point, the actual bandwidth that's still present in the signal is much lower than the sample rate, so you might also just downsample without losses (set decimation to something higher, e.g. 16), but for the sake of analysis, we won't do that.
The time sink should now show better values. Have a look at the edges; they are probably not extremely steep. For clock sync I'd hence recommend to just go and try the polyphase clock recovery instead of Müller & Mueller; chosing about any "somewhat round" pulse shape could work.
For fun and giggles, I clicked together a quick demo demod (GRC here):
which shows:

Calclulate Power consumption when CPU don't change to LPM Mode in Contiki

I need to calculate power consumption of CPU. According to this formula.
Power(mW) = cpu * 1.8 / time.
Where time is the sum of cpu + lpm.
I need to measure at the start of certain process and at the end, however the time passed it is to short, and cpu don't change to lpm mode as seen in the next values taken with powertrace_print().
all_cpu all_lpm all_transmit all_listen
116443 1514881 148 1531616
17268 1514881 148 1532440
Calculating power consumption of cpu I got 1.8 mW (which is exactly the value of current draw of CPU in active mode).
My question is, how calculate power consumption in this case?
If MCU does not go into a LPM, then it spends all the time in active mode, so the result of 1.8 mW you get looks correct.
Perhaps you want to ask something different? If you want to measure the time required to execute a specific block of code, you can add RTIMER_NOW() calls at the start and end of the block.
The time resolution of RTIMER_NOW may be too coarse for short-time operations. You can use a higher frequency timer for that, depending on your platform, e.g. read the TBR register for timing if you're compiling for a msp430 based sensor node.

Measuring end-to-end latency with the Paho sample pub/sub app

My aim is to measure MQTT device-to-device message latency (not throughput) and I'm looking for feedback on my code-hacks. The setup is simple; just one device serving as two end-points (old Linux PC with two terminal sessions; one running the subscriber and the other running the publisher sample app) and the default broker at tcp://m2m.eclipse.org:1883). I inserted time-capturing code-fragments into the C-language publish/subscribe sample apps on the src/samples folder.
Below are the changes. Please provide feedback.
Changes to the subscribe sample app (MQTTAsync_subscribe.c)
Inserted the lines below at the top of the msgarrvd (message arrived) function
//print arrival time
struct timeval tv;
gettimeofday (&tv, NULL);
printf("Message arrived: %ld.%06ld\n", tv.tv_sec, tv.tv_usec);
Changes to the publish sample app (MQTTAsync_publish.c)
Inserted the lines below at the top of the onSend (callback) function
struct timeval tv;
gettimeofday (&tv, NULL);
printf("Message with token value %d delivery confirmed at %ld.%06ld\n",
response->token, tv.tv_sec, tv.tv_usec);
With these changes (after subtracting the time message arrived at the subscriber from the time that the delivery was confirmed at the publisher), I get a time anywhere between 1 millisecond and 0.5 millisecond.
Questions
Does this make sense as a rough benchmark on latency?
Is this the round-trip time?
Is the round-trip time in the right ball-park? Should be less? more?
Is it the one-way time?
Should I design the latency benchmark in a different way? I need a rough measurements (I'm comparing with XMPP).
I'm using the default QoS value (1). Should I change it?
The publisher takes a finite amount of time to connect (and disconnect). Should these be added?
The 200ms latency is high ! Can you please upload your code here ?
Does this make sense as a rough benchmark on latency?
-- Yes it makes sense. But a better approach is to make an automated time subtract with subscribed message and both synchronized to NTP.
Is this the round-trip time? Is it the one-way time?
-- Messages got published - you received ACK for publisher and same message got transferred to subscribed client.
Is the round-trip time in the right ball-park? Should be less? more?
-- It should be less.
Should I design the latency benchmark in a different way? I need a rough measurements (I'm comparing with XMPP).
I'm using the default QoS value (1). Should I change it?
-- Try with QoS 0 ( fire and forget )
The publisher takes a finite amount of time to connect (and disconnect). Should these be added?
-- Yes. It needs to be added but this time should be very small.

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