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Thursday, March 23, 2017

Raspberry Pi 2 vs 3 Current Consumption During Boot

I just wanted to share this fairly uninteresting result in case its useful to anyone.

I measured the current drawn from a 5V power supply on both a Raspberry Pi 2 (with Realtek WiFi dongle) and a Raspberry Pi 3 (with built in WiFi) to get an idea of the current consumption while these two boards booted up.

So, with no further ado, here are the results.


Rather as expected - much the same, both settling down to an 'idle current' of around 300mA, booting in under 30 seconds.

In answer to MrMobileWill, to take the readings, I used the following setup.



I sacrificed a micro USB lead, stripping the wires to get the black and red power wires. I then put my multimeter in current mode in series between my bench power supply (set to 5V) and the Raspberry Pi.

This multimeter has an RS232 serial interface that I connected to my Mac using a USB to serial interface (cheap off eBay).

The software setup is a little complicated. So See my next post for details on how I did this.

3 comments:

MrMobileWill said...

Hi,

What did you use to measure the current?

Simon Monk said...

Hi,
I've added a description of how I took the measurements to the post. I've also made a separate post on using my model of multimeter with a Mac and Python. Which is what I used to take the readings that I could then paste into a spreadsheet.

Unknown said...

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