Current measurements of low-power battery driven devices

Abstract: A current meter has been designed, intended for surveillance of low-power battery driven devices with a large dynamic range in their current consumption. Among such devices may, for example, be nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). The large dynamic range originates in the nodes’ states from an active mode for data collection and communication to a sleep mode for preserving very limited energy and prolonging the lifetime of the device. The active mode draws current up to hundreds of milliamperes whilst the sleep mode’s current may be as low as 22 nA. This makes the dynamic range larger than 6 orders of magnitude. To perform measurements that prevail over noise sources and resolution of involved components, an increase in the SNR must be made. If the current is measured with a shunt resistor, this may be done by varying its resistance as required. The resistance should be as high as possible to maximize the SNR, but low enough such that the burden voltage of the current meter is kept within tolerances of the device. A literature study was done, and with the gained knowledge a circuit was designed and simulated in LTSpice. Then a printed circuit board (PCB) of the circuit was designed and implemented using Altium Designer (an ECAD program), manufactured and hand-soldered. The final PCB was tested but shown to have some design flaws that deteriorated the performance, for example too frequent switching of the current range.