It looks like Particle is EOL’ing the Electron LiPo batteries and putting them on final sale. I’m moving to utilizing a LiPo battery in my Boron/Argon application (mostly for RTC backup and similar tasks) and want to find a good supplier for batteries in the 500-2000mAh range, form factor flexible.
There seem to be very few industrial suppliers for batteries like this in the places I normally check. For those of you with a LiPo battery supplier, who do you use and what marketplace (if any) do you buy from?
The reason is that it’s essentially impossible to ship LiPo batteries overseas, and can even in the US there are difficulties (ground shipping only, for example).
The batteries themselves are mostly interchangeable, but beware of the polarity. While Sparkfun and Adafruit batteries are the same as Particle batteries, about half the ones you find on Amazon/eBay/AliExpress will be wired backwards. Almost all of the ones intended for remote control toys will have reverse polarity.
Obviously at scale you want to buy them with the right polarity, but for one or two for prototyping use it’s actually not hard to swap JST-PH battery connector polarity and we even have a video of how to do it using a pointy tool.
Thanks all for the info. As I’ve looked more and more into it, given that I unfortunately will need an external RTC for my use case that I’d need to power, I’ve tentatively landed on using two 2.5F ~5V supercaps ($4 each) one of which should give me around 15 days on the RTC (which is enough for me), and one of which I’ll stick on the boron/argon Li+ input (with diode protection) that gives 10-30 seconds of power, which is enough to send a final message and safely shut down SD cards and go to deep sleep to protect particle memory as well.
I mostly made that decision from supply chain availability and it just feels a little more targeted for my particular use case. Really liked what I saw from BatterySpace though.