Overview
Battery life is a feature, and it's usually the last one to get attention. Power optimization tends to land late, after the product works, when nobody wants to risk touching firmware that finally behaves. The result is a device that ships drawing more current than it should, with a battery spec written to match the firmware rather than the other way around. Embedder treats power as a measurable, closed-loop engineering problem instead of a guessing game.
Why power work gets skipped
Power is hard to reason about by reading code. A line that looks harmless keeps a peripheral clock running; a poll loop that should have been an interrupt holds the core out of its sleep state; a forgotten pull-up bleeds microamps for the life of the product. None of it shows up in a debugger, and none of it shows up until someone puts a current probe on the rail. So the work waits for a specialist and a bench, and the bench is always busy.
What the agent does
Embedder starts by measuring, not editing. With Hardware Interaction wired up, it drives a power profiler — Nordic PPK or Joulescope — to capture a current trace across the workload, then correlates the high-draw windows back to what the firmware was doing at that moment. From there it reads the reference manual to find the low-power modes, clock gates, and peripheral states the part actually supports, and proposes changes grounded in what the silicon allows rather than generic advice.
Typical wins are unglamorous and real: moving the core into a deeper sleep state between events, gating clocks to idle peripherals, replacing busy-wait polling with interrupt- or DMA-driven paths, tuning wake sources, and trimming GPIO and analog blocks left powered. Each change comes back with the measured before-and-after, so a 40 µA saving is a number you can see, not a claim.
Measure, change, re-measure
The loop is the whole point. The agent captures a baseline, applies a change, flashes the board, and re-runs the same profiling workload to confirm the draw actually dropped — and that nothing else regressed. Where a change trades latency or throughput for current, that trade-off shows up in the measurements instead of hiding in a commit message. The same closed loop that powers automated testing runs here against energy as the metric.
Diff-driven, reviewable
What lands is a pull request, or a series of them, each with the current measurement attached and the datasheet citation for why the change is safe on your part. There's no black-box rewrite of the firmware. Your engineers review every low-power change commit by commit, with the agent's reasoning and the numbers right alongside the code.
Who it's for
- Battery-powered and energy-harvesting products where runtime is a spec.
- Wireless and IoT devices living on a coin cell or a small LiPo.
- Teams chasing a sleep-current target late in a program with no time to spare.
- Hardware teams without a dedicated low-power specialist on hand.
Getting started
Quickest path is a scoping call: we look at your hardware and power budget together, hook up a profiler, and size the win honestly. Book a call.