I’m worried about the power consumption of my DWM1001 devices.
From what I’ve seen a tag with update rate of 100ms needs around 14 mA, a tag with update rate of 10 seconds needs 27 mA and an anchor without BLE is around 33 mA.
What most concerns me is that the power consumption goes high as the update rate get slower. Also, we’ve checked that if we set the update rate to be greater than 1 second the position of the tag is refreshed as set ( 2s, 5s, 10s …) but on the power analyser we keep seeing power peaks every second (image attached)
Please help us understand why is this happening and if this is the expected behaviour of the devices.
what you measured is Tag in Responsive mode. In this mode the DW1000 and MCU do not go to deep sleep. This mode is more suitable for demos or when consumption is not a problem. The BLE is constantly on and allows quick discovery.
In order to keep the Tag in sync with the slotted network it sync from time to time. When running at 100ms it can be actually more favorable because it does not need to sync… this is related with internal implementation.
If you want to achieve low power consumption, then switch to Low Power mode, i.e. disable Responsive mode.
Responsive mode is the same as “Low Power mode disabled” and vice versa. The naming is a bit confusing I admit.