MSoM development board battery charging

Hardware
1

Hi Particles,

I recently started some development work using the MSoM development board M.2 breakout board | Reference | Particle, which comes with a 3100 Mah Battery Batteries | Hardware | Particle and I’m trying to fire out how I can charge the battery? Do I need an external charger? How can I incorporate a solar charger?

The board comes with two power management modules and as far as I can see does not allow for recharging the battery using an external source e.g. the (supplied) 12 volt AC adaptor?

Am I missing something? (likely)

Appreciate any advice on this

2

The M.2 breakout board contains a built-in charger via the bq24195 PMIC on the PM-BAT power module.

The caveat is that you cannot charge by USB-C on the M.2 breakout board. You need to use an external 9-12V power supply.

The Muon also has a PM-BAT module, but it does allow charging from a USB-C PD port, but the M.2 breakout does not have the PD circuitry.

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3

Thanks, After posting, I saw the PMIC but was unclear on how to use it - the diagram seems to indicate input from both 12v and C-USB. Assume a 12 v solar charger output will work but will do homework.

4

Yes, you can connect a 12V solar panel to the 12V input. Even though a 12V panel can exceed 12V, it's still within the maximum supported by the PMIC (which is actually 17V).

The only caveat is that if it's a small panel, you may have to adjust the PMIC input current limit setting in software. If the current limit higher than what the panel can supply, it results in charging turning on and off continuously, because when it draws too much current from the panel the voltage drops, which stops charging, which causes the voltage to rise, and the process repeats forever without much charging going on.

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