Meet the Otii Arc
Made for hardware, firmware and software developers, the Otii Arc is a brilliant instrument for your workbench.
Every now and again we get a product in our expansive SparkFun catalog that really gets us excited to use and show off. When Nathan brought the new Otii Arc in house from our friends at Qoitech, we all had to gather around to see what the little instrument had to offer. Today we're going to take a closer look to see what it is and how it works!
The Otii Arc is a truly versatile power supply and analyzer. Coupled with powerful but easy-to-use software, it is an ideal tool to help study the power draw of your IoT project or device. It can record and display real-time currents, voltages and/or UART logs. It provides nanoamp resolution current measurements with a sample rate of up to 4000 samples per second!
Otii (rhymes with body) is handy in all sorts of troubleshooting situations. The Otii truly shines with any device that needs to be designed to sleep for low power and has to run 'a long time' on a battery. The Otii Arc can measure current very accurately over eight orders of magnitude from tens of nanoamps up to 5 Amps. This means you can measure the sleep current of a board and the peak current draw all in one continuous measurement. Leave the system logging for hours then read the minimum, maximum and average current and power use straight from the oscilloscope-like recording. By linking the Otii Arc to a UART (Serial) pin and/or a GPIO pin, you can immediately see what the current draw was while the code was performing a specific task.
It is pretty impressive how robust the Otii Arc is, too. Measuring in at 4.29 in x 5.66 in x 1.73 in (WxLxH) and weighing in at just under a pound (450 grams to be exact), the instrument is incredibly portable. It is designed for the office, the lab, and usage at home, as well as field measurements. Also, the innovative mechanical design allows for efficient heat dissipation, so no fan is needed and therefore emits no noise.
From being able to connect a battery to the Otii Arc and discharging it while recording the voltage and current profile (and being able to emulate that same battery), to being able to connect an external power supply (7.5 - 9 V) with the ability to deliver up to 5.0 V at 2.5 A continuous at a 5 A peak, the Otii Arc has an impressive feature set.
And to those of you who might be a bit hesitant about having something at this price point without much knowledge on how to use it: Qoitech has put together an extensive hub of guides for you to use! These guides include your basic "Step One" quick start documents for each of the Otii Arc's main features, how to set up battery life simulators, graphs, recordings, etc, as well as advanced guides for more experienced users. It's all there!
So, what do you think? We hope that you find the Otii Arc as impressive as we do. Let us know what you'd like to see more of and if you have any questions about the instrument and we'll do our best to showcase the product based on what you'd like to see!
