Greetings all,
I’m continuing to work thru the sunny buddy trying to get it to charge any battery. Brand new hardware as I believe I somehow killed the last sunny buddy. The current configuration is such:
Lab power supply 6v @ 2A (solar panel simulator) → Sunny buddy → INA260 power sensor → Photon weather shield
There is a a 2000mAh LiPo attached to the sunny buddy battery connector
The Photon takes a power reading once a minute and it gets sent up to ubidots for graphing. I see the downstream power consumption is about 110mA going toward the photon weather shield. I did the set point calibration with the bench power supply as documented in the hook up guide. SET test point = 3v.
From the graph I can see that the SB does not indicate it’s charging until the battery gets down to about 3.9v then !CHRG is asserted… However the voltage as measured between the SB and the weather shield continued to drop. At some point we hit the 3.3v regulator drop out voltage (mic5205 on the weather shield) and the whole thing dies. I’d expect that once !CHRG is asserted that the voltage measured would start to increase toward approx 4.2v thusly recharging the LiPo battery. No such behavior. Given the current draw measured at the weather shield ~110mA, there should be ~300mA to send toward the LiPo for recharging.
So here is the question, why no LiPo charging? There is ample current from the bench power supply for this action. I’ve not modified the Sunny Buddy, other than adjusting the sense potentiometer as explained above, so I’m expecting a net positive ~300mA of current heading back to the LiPo for charging.
Any and all help is appreciated.
