I’ll keep updated how it goes
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Very cool!
I have a really hard time keeping my uConsole charged up and I’ve already had a few of the 18650 cells I’ve used die on me and refuse to take a charge.
I was thinking of putting a hobby battery connector in mine to make it easier to swap in some different packs as I just haven’t been that thrilled with the cylindrical ones. I’ve reassigned my less trustworthy ones to my flashlight and headlamp.
I am also curious to see how well this works!
From what I can tell so far, whatever subsystem is managing the charging is reporting as if the battery is not utilized fully according to spec. My gut feeling is that it is 60-70% charged when max, which is probably good for the $20 battery but defeats the purpose. It shows 4.08V instead of 4.2V max, and 24.79 Wh energy instead of what I believe should be 18.5*2=37Wh
Around 10hrs of idle runtime
Also it is shutting off at about 10% of charge, probably because of the polarity protecting diodes on the PCB that I did not remove
I’ll be investigating further.
According to schematic those diodes cannot be the problem DevTerm/Schematics/clockwork_DevTerm_Battery_Schematic.pdf at main · clockworkpi/DevTerm · GitHub
But overcurrent protection fuses F1 & F2 (ASMD1812SL) hypothetically can
I’ll check if bypassing the fuses help with shutoffs and better voltage sensing.
Otherwise there is something to do with AXP228 config
I got a 20Ah external battery instead.
The only problem will be how to keep it connected while in the sleeve in the backpack.
Found a cable that might solve that…
Maybe you need configure the correct battery capacity in devicetree and run a battery calibration?
I bypassed the fuses by soldering a short-circuit wire, put the lower battery discharge voltage as per battery spec, and haven’t had major issues since. I also pushed the battery module connection more tight.
echo "3100000" > /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery/voltage_min
maybe it self-calibrated, the values still read it seemingly wrong but runtime improved and there have been no shutoffs
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