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.
I pulled my veteran DMM, a Voltcraft MXD-4660A, from the drawer to set up my workbench (adding a serial-to-USB converter) and gave it a second tour of duty with QtDMM on Ubuntu. After a bit of searching online what to use under I found the QtDMM project at http://www.mtoussaint.de/qtdmm.htmlm , but appears abandoned. The active fork, I think, is at https://github.com/tuxmaster/QtDMM.
Here’s the final install and setup for my lab computer running Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy):
# run from the same build dir used for the install
sudo xargs rm < build/install_manifest.txt
Troubleshooting:
If you hit errors, try a clean build reset instead of first searching forums.
I learned the hard way to make a clean install as a belt-and-suspenders reset, that deletes built objects but keeps the CMake cache.
“|| true” lets the sequence continue even if the clean step fails due to a broken config.
“rm -rf build CMakeCache.txt CMakeFiles” force-removes any stale out-of-source build dir and any accidental in-source CMake cache:
“Final ./compile.sh” does a fresh configure and build:
