For some of the next TōGō-Lab projects I’m thinking about, I want some gear that lets me look properly into the very low-power usage of my builds instead of just guessing. Besides some more expensive gear like the Joulescope, I finally bought Nordic’s Power Profiler Kit II, which looked like a very good fit for the kind of measurements I want to do. Nordic positions the PPK2 as a standalone power-measurement and power-optimization tool for embedded hardware, with support for real-time current measurements and use with both Nordic boards and external hardware.
As typical for some lab gear, it runs nicely under Windows, in my case in a virtual Win10 setup. But I wanted it on my actual Linux workbench machine, where the rest of the lab IT frontend for my tools lives. That part was a bit more difficult than expected. Nordic gives you an AppImage, but it is a little bit tricky to get it running.
Because the blog will malformat the command lines find the installation lab notes as markdown file in my Gitea as project #0006:
https://gitea.togo-lab.io/tgohle/0006-Setting_up_Nordic_PowerProfilerKitII_Linux
For the official side, Nordic’s product page for the kit is here, the official PPK2 setup documentation is here, and the official nRF Connect for Desktop installation documentation is linked here.
Test Measurement:
