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Nexus7 Power Measurement

Steve Conklin did an initial investigation on the power consumption on the Nexus7 by watching the I2C bus and doing some disassembly of the unit:

• Initial Nexus7 Power Investigation (ODP)

• git repo for tools mentioned in the above presentation: git@github.com:sconklin/nexus-tools.git (https://github.com/sconklin/nexus-tools)

Identifying Issues

The same tools used to identify power issues for other architectures (like powertop) work just fine:

• Identifying Power Management Issues

• Measuring CPU usage is a good way to detect when your application is drawing too much power, kcachegrind and callgrind (part of Valgrind) are excellent tools.

Statistics

Colin King maintains several tools to gather statistics on power consumption:

• Eventstat: calculates the rate of events per second and can dump the data in a .csv

• $ sudo apt-get install eventstat
• $ sudo eventstat

Hardware Tools

The ARM Energy Probe is a hardware tool that is fairly cheap and can be used to measure power consumption. It uses a GPL software stack and offers command-line and HTML5+websockets interface. Here is an intro video on using the ARM Energy Probe.

At Linaro Connect, Andy Green, from Linaro, gave a very good presentation on power measurement (Slides on PDF, Youtube presentation)