Determine power usage from OS?

fnoop

Hi, is there any way of monitoring power usage of the board from the OS? It's very useful to log and graph the power consumption over time for integration and system design purposes.

eduncan911

For the CPU and GPU on die, there are standard Intel apps like Intel Power Gadget.

If you are talking about the board itself, I don't think there is a monitor on the board. I could be wrong though and they could surprise us with some unknown functionality.

What exactly are you looking to measure?

The draw at the 5V barrel connector? You can modify a Kill-A-Watt to transmit over wifi, bluetooth or Xbee for that - there are several examples of that online . Though, not very precise when measuring in mA.

fnoop

Ah thanks for the tip - the Intel Power Gadget looks to be a desktop app unless you delve into the library bindings, but it looks to use RAPL. I didn't realise rapl was common across intel platforms, I have a conversion script from the Joule that outputs snapshots of power consumption in watts:
https://github.com/fnoop/maverick/blob/stable/manifests/maverick-modules/maverick_analysis/files/joule-power.sh

For the joule this rapl reading was apparently for the module as a whole, I wonder what it means on the up boards - presumably just the CPU/GPU? (which is OK, it's certainly better than nothing)

It's very useful in embedded environments that are power conscious (I'm working in drone environment) to be able to determine when you start eating a lot of power, eg: