I just heard from my chum Matt Liberty. In addition to presenting at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) and serving on its technical advisory board, Matt is the founder of Jetperch, an engineering services company that tackles hardware and software development challenges across a wide range of industries, including consumer electronics, telecom, and industrial.

Matt tells me that, over the past couple of years, he has been working on a test equipment product called Joulescope, which makes energy optimization easy and inexpensive for low-power microprocessor-based systems, such as the “things” that live at the edge of the internet of things (IoT).

Meet Joulescope. (Source: Jetperch)

Joulescope measures current and voltage and computes power and energy. (Source: Jetperch)

Matt says that Joulescope measures from –1 A to 3 A. The purpose of the negative side is to capture the glitches and transients that occur during normal operation of a target device. At the high end, Joulescope supports bursts up to 10 A, such as those seen during inrush current testing. Furthermore, Joulescope also supports down to 1.5-nA resolution in its most sensitive 18-µA current range.

A key point is that Joulescope’s current measurement is fully autoranging, and what really sets it apart is that it autoranges so fast as to have no practical effect on the device under test. Joulescope switches current ranges in under 2 µs to avoid “browning out” the target device, which is very important when the target device transitions from sleep mode (nA or µA) to active mode (mA or A) or vice versa. Joulescope also has sufficient bandwidth for you to observe short-duration events like interrupt service routines (ISRs).

The really exciting part of all of this is that Matt’s Joulescope Precision Energy Analyzer is now live on Kickstarter. Matt tells me that the campaign is already 45% funded after only 5.5 hours (we should all be so lucky). Check out this video of Matt introducing Joulescope.