Measure power consumption with Otii tool

A usual question you have when designing a device is the autonomy of your battery and the power consumption of your device. By the past I’ve tried different tools for this usage. Starting with USB sticks power consumption, only working for high consuming devices. They are low precision. Going to multimeter tools with USB connectivity precise but sampling at 3-5Hz only. During a certain time I’ve plan to make a solution on my own and finally I’ve found the OTII tool from QOITECH on the recommendation of friends from Sigfox community.

Here is my experience with that tool.

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Choose your smd (MLCC) capacitor

mlcc-smd-kondensatoren-foto-samsungThere are different type of smd capacitor ; the one I mainly use are mlcc – multi layer ceramic capacitor. In this technology, there are different dielectric (NP0, X7R, X5R, Y5V) with different characteristics.

I was looking for informations about this and found different nice website. I’ll try to summarize what I found in this post.

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Telecom Device TD1205 – Sigfox – Test

TD1205 - sigfox

TD1205 – sigfox

The TD1205 device is more than the usual Telecom Design Sigfox embedded circuit as TD1204 and TD1208, they are a all in one chip providing GPS antenna and RF antenna. Ready to use, to be clear you just need to plug a battery to use it.

In my point of view, for many applications not requiring more than 2 GPIOs, this product is really easy and chip way to design a SigFox product. As it costs around 55$ and you just have to add box & battery id sounds like the most affordable for small quantities. But …

This post is detailing what is specific to this chip ; read more following the link

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Make you own PCB

I recently created a printed circuit board for a raspberry PI design i’m working on. By the past, when I did such things, the cost to make it was not accessible for a home made design. In 10 years things have change a lot and now, you can do it for less than 100€ for a 10×10 two layer board. 4 layer is also something accessible.

I want to share with you this experience, because, I had a good and an bad experience to share.

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