Boron battery issue

Troubleshooting
1

Hi all

Wanted to share this just incase anyone had had a similar issue.

I have a boron gatewaying for 7 xenons and its been working fine for many weeks. It has been connected to mains power with a battery attached. Battery is the 1850mAh one supplied by Particle

I had the boron sleep through the night to conserve data trans.

Yesterday I switched it on and it went imediately into deep sleep. I checked code, reflashed several times all to no avail. It was unuseable.

Then i noticed that when i plugged in a usb cable the battery charge light went bonkers. So i swapped the battery over and it returned to perfect operation.

This does however raise a question. Can a boron be run on mains power with a battery fitted for a long period of time?

Im thinking of putting the charger on a plug in timer so as to give the battery time to discharge.

2 Likes
2

It should normally be fine to continuously leave the Boron powered by USB/VUSB with the battery attached. The bq24195 will only charge the battery when discharged (no danger of over-charging) and under normal operation it also powers directly from USB, bypassing the battery. It’s normally better to leave a Lithium polymer battery fully charged rather than force it to go through charge-discharge cycles.

You might have just had a battery failure.

1 Like
3

Hi Rickkas

I thought battery failure too, but its been powering another xenon today without incident.

It could also be related to my poor coding skills I guess!

4

which version firmware version? I’ve had some battery charging issues that may be related to a charging amperage issue in firmware version 1.4.2. There’s a thread related to solar charging that talks about it, I’ve been working other things since then tho and can’t say for sure if this is your issue, or even speak to the fixes they discuss in that thread.

5

Hi

its using 1.4.2 and i have had a similar issue with it again where it flashes green forever without connecting to cloud.

Strange thing is that i swapped battery and it connected without issue so could be battery related

6

I was able to fix my issues with the battery. No idea which of these lines did the trick but here it is:

void setup() {
  detachInterrupt(LOW_BAT_UC);
  // Delay for up to two system power manager loop invocations
  delay(2000);
  // Change PMIC settings
  PMIC pmic;
  pmic.begin();
  pmic.setInputVoltageLimit(4360);  //  for 5V input
  pmic.setChargeVoltage(3850);      //  Set Li-Po charge termination voltage to 3.850V
  pmic.enableDPDM();  
  pmic.enableBuck();                //  enableBuck required when using EN Pin Shutdown ??.
  pmic.enableCharging();

}
8

still not sure if your issue is the same as mine, but I've done some more troubleshooting, see this thread, I posted some code there that might fix your issues:

9

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