When a new Pi comes out, I usually publish some power consumption figures, mainly for those people who want to estimate battery durations…. It’s important to understand the limitations of any equipment, tests and results. Comparing the readouts on the bench power supply, clamp meter and taking the actual data readings from the eMeter gives a reasonable degree of confidence in the results (when they agree, which they did fairly well).
The eMeter gives time-averaged readings (updated several times per second) to two decimal places of an Amp, which is good enough for our purposes. It won’t give a true picture of peak instantaneous current e.g. on power-up of the ARM cores from idle. This matters only when selecting a PSU to run your Pi (you already have the official recommendations of a 2.5 Amp PSU for that). What we’re interested in is power usage over time, so you can work out what size battery pack or solar panel you will need for portable applications.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!