Developing a data acquisition system for measuring microcontroller energy consumption using LabVIEW

This paper presents a data acquisition system to automate microcontroller energy consumption measurements. Taking a single measurement with a multimeter does not require much, but taking thousands of measurements per second will result in large amount of data that needs to be thoughtfully stored. The aim of the measurement system is to gather current consumption and pin toggle from microcontroller while executing different software programs. The data collection is handled via LabVIEW System Design Software. The measuring devices are connected to the host system by local area network and thus making them accessible from anywhere in the lab. The measurement equipment consists of power source, multimeter and oscilloscope which are all setup and controlled in LabVIEW. The gathered data is saved into TDMS file which is analysed during post-processing.