Prop 1 and powered by LiPo batteries
Buck Rogers
Posts: 2,185
in Propeller 1
Hello!
I've just confirmed that an ordinary Quickstart and an unmodified one at that, can be powered by one of these:
that one is of course sold by Sparkfun. They also sell a fuel gauge for them, which looks like this:
and can be found here combining the two, with the QS drawing power from the battery, and monitoring its levels are next. As soon as I work out the I2C coding for the QS of course.
I'll have photos and video up as soon as I can.
I've just confirmed that an ordinary Quickstart and an unmodified one at that, can be powered by one of these:
that one is of course sold by Sparkfun. They also sell a fuel gauge for them, which looks like this: and can be found here combining the two, with the QS drawing power from the battery, and monitoring its levels are next. As soon as I work out the I2C coding for the QS of course.I'll have photos and video up as soon as I can.
Comments
Okay the video is available, but I'm not sure how enable it for presentation. But it is present on this message. Look for an AVI file.
And the photos.
And I'm still scratching my head over that one as it uses normal I2C communications, and the pages for it show code example for the AVR......
https://github.com/awelters/LiPoFuelGauge
Well yes it does Twiki but it was first written for the Arduino. I already have it. However the part does communicate using the I2C methods so someone should have tried before me.
Or is there some magic inside the module?
I thought it is only for gauging and not for regulating.
I thought 3.7 would be too high for VDD, and probably would not work on VIN.
Well later today I'll check and see if the module works and not powered by that one.
Actually it became today. The module does work when powered by two regular cells rather than the original LiPoly one.
NMOS with reverse current blocking, Ultralow Dropout Voltage: 40 mV Typical at 250 mA
http://www.mouser.com/Texas-Instruments/Semiconductors/Power-Management-ICs/LDO-Voltage-Regulators/_/N-5cgacZscv7?P=1z0zls6Z1z0wa2e&Keyword=NMOS&FS=True
Are you connecting the battery before the regulator, or after the regulator on the QuickStart card? The specs for the QS say that the power voltage should be 3.3 volts or 4 to 9 volts depending on where you connect it. A lipo cell has a voltage range of 3 volts to 4.2 volts, so this would need to be connected before the regulator.
Dave
Close. Those are two N cells in that dual holder. It's unswitched which is why I use it for other jobs. For everything here I use ones who are covered and indeed use AAs or even AAAs for power. And of course are switched.
And as it happens my recent order from Adafruit includes the sort of thing that would use the LiPoly rig earlier and did.
However.... Those also were connected to the same connection places as before.
Two alkaline batteries will be around 3 volts when they are fully charged, but will drop below 2.7 volts during most of their discharge cycle.
Hello!
Makes sense. Next go-round I'll look for the appropriate power connection points for using that LiPoly one.
lipo is in the range that it's to high without ldo and to low w/ a regular dropout LDO.
1: keep target to 3.3V with ultralow dropout LDO.
2: change target to 3.0V with a regular LDO.
3: use lifepo4 battery as they stay in the 3-3.6V range.
I did mess about with a Z80 and a prop together and to "do for the middle ground" I had the volts at 4.1 Volts for quite a while and nothing went wrong ... but that doesn't mean that it was right, I suppose ...
9 Volts ... once ... something did go wrong ...
Alan