Adding barrel connector to SparkFun Battery Shield breaks deep sleep?

Troubleshooting
1

Got my issues with reading battery level resolved with the new firmware. (see Issue with using Core in a new Sparkfun Battery Shield)

I logged about 5-6 days worth of data through several charges, and got my drain model mapped out in full-on, wifi-sleep, and deep sleep. So far so good, and the energy savings are tremendous when using deep sleep.

So I took the project (self-sustaining garden monitor) to the next step, which was soldering a barrel connector to the bottom of the shield and used SparkFun’s recommended Solar panel.

From then on, whether the panel is connected to the barrel connector or not, the deep sleep fails to wake up. It charges via solar, and the code on the very first boot runs, but it never seems to awaken from the deep sleep. The code is unchanged from what gave me several days of data, so I am wondering if simply having that barrel jack connected is somehow hosing the wakeup?

I haven’t changed the code back to light sleep or fully awake to test that, because I really want to be able to use the battery savings of deep sleep.

Anyone played with adding the connector to the Battery Shieid?

Thanks in advance-

2

Hi @patrickcentral

I don’t have any experience with the SparkFun battery shield but at the chance of sounding a little simplistic, have you tried removing the barrel connector and go back to the state your project was last working?

Is it possible you got some solder somewhere else?

Are there any conductive parts of the connector that may be touching a pin, or maybe a trace, or pad, or via on the battery shield?

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