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Power measurement software by Qoitech is available from Digi-Key Electronics, following the signing of a worldwide distribution agreement to distribute Otii, a power measurement tool with software.
Otii provides developers with the means to simplify power measurement of applications and devices, especially those targeting the IoT space and aiming for optimised, long battery life. Otii combines the measurement capabilities of several test and measurement hardware tools into the Otii Arc, a device that makes it substantially easier for developers to pinpoint which sections of code, associated peripherals, and hardware contribute most to the application’s power consumption.
Powered by a PC’s USB port or an external 7.0 to 9.0V power supply, the Otii Arc provides power to the target application whilst measuring and displaying power consumption from below one microA to 5.0A without the need to manually change the settings.
As well as measuring power consumption, the Otii Arc, together with the accompanying Otii software, can also monitor additional analogue and digital signals, allowing application sub-systems to be monitored in parallel to the main power input. Any serial data, from 9600bit per second to 4Mbit per second, output by the target can also be synchronously captured and time-stamped.
Qoitech’s Otii software runs on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu Linux. The developer can review power consumption from a development PC and share and compare the results with colleagues, customers and suppliers. The software increases usability when compared to traditional test and measurement tools, claims Digi-Key, as these can require results to be displayed on the tool itself, or to be exported for later analysis in a spreadsheet without the test settings and related context of the application.
Vanja Samuelsson, founder of Qoitech, says: “By combining current measurement, voltage measurement and debug logs output by the target’s serial interface, developers acquire a significantly improved view of their IoT application’s power consumption, allowing them to guarantee a battery life of up to 10 years for some applications.”
The Otii solution comes with a standard software license, but with the additional purchase of an Otii Premium License, developers can access the battery profiling, simulation and scripting capabilities of the Otii software. Using the Lua scripting language, the Otii Arc can be used to profile batteries, allowing different batches of the same cell to be compared, or to evaluate their performance under environmental conditions that more closely match that of the application. The Lua scripting also enables automated testing, allowing longer term tests to be run without human intervention.
Otii solution is available to ship immediately from Digi-Key Electronics.
