Hello!
Is there a recommended way to have an external battery pack hooked up to a Boron som? I have a lipo attached to the normal battery port, but I’d like to provide additional power with an Anker external battery, and was wondering if that would work best via the barrel jack or USB.
It’s way easier for me to do it with the barrel jack due to the enclousure I am using, but one thing that seems to be happening is that once the battey pack fully charges my device, the charging light shuts off and doesn’t really come back on again. I am wondering if this is something with the FuelGauge or the battery pack, and worried that once I put it in the field, it will charge it to 100% and then just stop charging.
The battery is charged until it is full, the system is powered from your external source while and after charging.
That's how it works. The battery would get damaged if charging wouldn't stop at 100%.
If you remove your external power source, your Boron will be powered from the battery. Connecting the power source will charge the battery again until it's full.
@nils To rephrase, if I leave the anker battery plugged into the barrel jack, will not the system run from the anker battery until that dies, and then the lipo will take over?
I suspect you battery pack does have a auto-shut-off when the current draw of the attached device goes bellow a certain threshold for a set amount of time.
While the LiPo is charging the current draw obviously does keep the battery pack busy, but the Boron alone seems to be too modest to keep it running.
Let’s say your battery pack is 12V 8000mAh connected via barrel jack to VUSB and GND and LiPo to LiPo connector so the boron is powered from your battery pack not from LiPo and charging indicator will go off after LiPo is fully charged. As maintoined above by your boron even after full charge of LiPo is still powered via VBUS/barrel jack/battery pack until the battery pack either is disconnected or daid completely then Boron starts to be powered from LiPo. If you would like to preserve battery pack and power your Boron from LiPo after fully charged you would have to implement this in code and use some kind of external relay to disconnect your battery pack after full charge and then when LiPo level reach let’s say, 30% turn on Battery pack again
@Rftop Thank you everyone for your help and making it really clear! Also I am totally going to go with this solution!! Their pack even fits the footprint of the anker enclosure I made!
