Comments: Photon Battery Shield Hookup Guide

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  • Member #564300 / about 8 years ago * / 1

    I'm not having any success with the battery fuel gauge feature of the shield. It doesn't seem to make any difference if I have my Photon connected via USB serial or over wifi, the values for voltage, SoC and alert never seem to change when running the MAX17043_Simple example:

    • Voltage: 5.12 V
    • Alert: 1
    • Percentage: 256.00 %

    I'm using the 2000 mAh 3.7 V lipo battery with the shield. I've done some research and it looks like firmware version was an issue in the past (LINK), but using Particle Build I'm targeting firmware version 0.5.2.

    The battery itself holds a charge and seems to work fine. I'd like to be able to integrate the fuel gauge into a project though.

    Any ideas? Has anyone else gotten these particular values?

    *****–– UPDATE ––*****

    Thanks to Duncan at SparkFun, I was able to get the fuel gauge to work by isolating the problem: Connecting just the Photon, battery shield and the lipo battery, I was able to get realistic values for voltage and SoC over the cloud using the MAX17043_Simple sketch. From there I added components back to the circuit one at a time and tested the fuel gauge to make sure it was still working properly each time. It turned out that changing a wiring connection from digital pin 1 (D1) to something else other than digital pin 0 (D0) did the trick.

  • Member #767698 / about 8 years ago / 1

    I tried hooking up power (5V-1A) to the Vin and GND pins on the board, but noticed an issue. The input power works fine when there is no battery hooked up. But the moment I hook up a battery (LiPo 2000mAh), it seems to interfere with the input signal and doesn't charge at all.

  • Member #530354 / about 8 years ago * / 1

    Is this up to date? When using the library, I get the following error verifying/flashing - https://cloudup.com/c4t0Lg6ql5E - opened issue here https://github.com/sparkfun/SparkFun_MAX17043_Particle_Library/issues/1

    • jimblom / about 8 years ago / 1

      Issue should be addressed now. Looks like Particle changed functionality of the Particle variable API. Updated example has been pushed to Particle Build.

      Thanks for the heads up!


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