The Orange NB-IoT RDK it is a rapid development kit to get started with Orange Narrow Band IoT or NB-IoT. Combined with the Orange Maker IoT Cloud Platform for prototyping, building a proof-of-concept to validate your use case has never been more easy.
A lot of IoT use cases require battery driven devices. Most rapid prototyping Arduino style boards, do not have the capability to measure current consumption in a convenient way with a basic multimeter. The Mbili board is equiped to do this. By removing jumper JP4, the current drawn from the battery can be measured with an ampere meter. The battery voltage can be measured from the Arduino sketch to determine the status of it.
When using the NB-IoT Bee, there are some peak currents during initialization of the network. Depending on the multimeter used, the internal resistance of the meter can cause the brown out detector of the microcontroller to reset the board.
To overcome this, a 1 ohm resistor connected to JP4 can be used to measure the voltage over it in millivolt with a multimeter. The readout in millivolt is the equivalent of the consumed milliamps.
The caption above shows a 0.2mV readout, equivalent of around 200uA. This measurement was done during sleep mode of the Mbili board and the NB-IoT Bee. How to do this, is demonstrated in the Orange NB-IoT RDK power optimisation project.
Battery statusThe battery voltage can also be measured by the microcontroller from pin A6. The voltage measured on pin A6 is the one over R13 of the resistor divider.
The Arduino sketch below provides a basic implementation of the conversion for the measured battery voltage to percentage. It will also send the battery percentage to the Orange Maker IoT cloud.
Before uploading the sketch, the battery asset will have to be created in the Orange Maker. Name it battery, type integer.
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