measuring energy consumption

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TK1
1

I want to use Nvidia Jetson (with Tegra K1 SoC) in a robotics project which is distributing a program over some robots.

I want to measure the power consumption of computation(Arm processor) and communication(Zigbee or Wifi) of running our application on the board. actually, we need a power model of them, and we decided to use a real board for this power model (at this stage, we just need some real numbers for power consumption of our application).

To measure the power consumption, an option is Monsoon power monitor which is expensive for me.
another option is Arm Energy Probe.

my question is:
1- is there any other way to measure the energy consumption of the board except “arm energy probe” and Monsoon?
2- do I have to change the board for using Arm Energy Probe, for example inserting some shunt resistor, or not.

2

Can roughly tested total power consumption help on this? If so, you can simply measure the board input V/I and get power value then.
If want to get accurate number for each power rail, you’d better to add resistor (e.g. 0.01 ohm or 0.02 ohm) in series.

3

is there any onboard power sensor? if not, which devices can I use to measure the power?

4

No such sensor onboard. I have no experience of ARM Energy Probe or Monsoon, what I can suggest is as above for total power or each rail power.

5

Hi amati,

In the “Jetson_TK1_Schematics_4.04.pdf” page 27 you can find an interessant thing :
R5C11 is a shunt of 0.005 Ohms.
So put two wires on it (just after the jack plug physically on the board) and connect it to a voltmeter and with a simple multiplication you have your on board total consumption :).

Then to separate consumption of your application the challenge is to put all at off except the one you want to measure with software…
Another way could be to erase registers in the AMS PMU (AS3722) to power off all except the DC-DC bucks AS3728 (6 parts).With that you will only provide supply to the CORE-GPU-CPU and measure the computation consumption. But you may need a NDA with AMS to have them provide you the datasheet and registers values.

Regards,
Ale

6

Hi,

I am also looking for a way to measure power consumption of the different elements of the board (CPU, GPU, memory) but found nothing so far…
For the global consumption of the board there is a paper by E. Calore et al. called “Energy-Performance Tradeoffs for HPC Applications on Low Power Processors” describing an Arduino-based setup.
Here is link to the corresponding presentation :
http://uchpc15.lrr.in.tum.de/uchpc15-slides-calore.pdf

Regards,

Sylvain

7

AS3722 PMU measures currents on major voltage rails so you can read those out.