This is a fork of energytrace-util by Lukas K. / carrotIndustries.
Some MSP430 launchpads such as the MSP430FR4133 LaunchPad include the so-called "EnergyTrace™ technology". It consists of a software-controlled DC-DC converter that can measure the energy it is delivering. See Automatic Energy Model Generation with MSP430 EnergyTrace for accuracy figures and some odds and ends.
The "official" way to make use of this feature is TI's Code Composer Studio IDE. For scripting purposes, EnergyTrace measurements can also be obtained from TI's closed source MSP430 API. energytace-util exposes this API to the command line.
energytrace <timeout in seconds>
If timeout is 0, run indefinitely. In any case, measurements can be terminated gracefully by sending SIGTERM or SIGINT to energytrace (i.e., by pressing Ctrl+C).
Measurement data is written to stdout.
Data is written to stdout in 4 columns:
- Timestamps (µs) since start of the measurement,
- Mean current (nA) over the last ten to thousand intervals,
- Mean voltage (mV) with details unknown, and
- Cumulative energy (nJ) since start of the measurement.
Note that the EnergyTrace hardware and firmware only measure time, voltage, and energy. Current readings are calculated by the MSP430 client library and heavily filtered. Differentiating and low-pass filtering the energy measurements leads to far more accurate readings than the provided current data.
Debug information is prefixed with a #, so it is ignored by gnuplot and the
likes.
You'll need MSP430 debug stack (libmsp430.so) and the usual things like make and a not too recent gcc (version 8 works fine). As building the MSP430 debug stack is a bit difficult at this time, this fork relies on the precompiled libmsp430.so provided by TI in its MSP430Flasher tool. The following instructions are known to work with 32-bit MSP430Flasher 1.3.7 and 64-bit (x64) MSP430Flasher 1.3.15.
Download and extract the MSP430Flasher archive. Here, we assume that it has
been extracted to /opt/MSP430Flasher_1.3.15, please adjust the path
accordingly.
$ make MSP430FLASHER=/opt/MSP430Flasher_1.3.15
$ ./energytrace <measurement duration in seconds> > energytrace.log
Add -m32 to CFLAGS if you're using a 32-bit libmsp430.so variant.
Use your favourite tool for visualizing and processing the recorded data.
If you want to use EnergyTrace++ (with CPU state data), refer to energytracepp.c. Note that this decreases the sampling rate from ~3.7 to ~1.1 kHz and may significantly delay CPU state transitions, especially when waking up from low-power modes.