How you would hook up and control a 5v booster and lidar (the Sharp one that comes in the Electron sensor kit) in such a way that in between readings the voltage booster is cut off?
(This application has no USB attached, it is powered through the (LiPo) battery only - but in the future I wish to add a solar panel to charge the LiPo ).
If you don’t want the step-up converter to be on all the time, you either need to control the input power via a transistor attached to a free GPIO pin or you use a step-up converter with a dedicated enable/sleep pin and control that via a free GPIO.
You want a DC to DC regulator that has an Enable pin to allow the Photon to control when the DC regulator is turn ON and OFF so you can only turn it ON when you need it.
Your better off with this one since it has a Shutdown pin that you can control with the Photon to turn it off when your not using it. The other unit would consume 1mA of power constantly when your not using it.