I’m wondering if this combo will power up properly if I connect from the load pins on Sunny Buddy to Vin on the Weather Shield? The description of the Weather Shield says it has voltage regulators so my guess is yes, but I just want to verify Vin is the correct pin to connect.
I assume I shouldn’t connect from Sunny Buddy into the Redboard since the Redboard needs 7-15v on the barrel connector and the Sunny Buddy will only provide ~3-4v.
Or is there a better way?
Hello brianfoshee.
I don’t think the Weather Shield is going to work on the RedBoard Artemis unfortunately, the shield was designed with the Uno in mind and a lot of the design choices were made assuming a ATmega328 was going to be the processor in use. You could probably modify the shield and code to function on the Artemis but that might be more work than you want to go through. The shield also uses 5 volt I/O and the Artemis is limited to 3.3 volt I/O.
That being said, the shield needs a stable 5 volt power source in order to function properly. Since you’re using a battery for power, you’d need to have the Sunny Buddy charge a battery and then put a boost converter between the battery and (non Artemis) RedBoard to boost the battery voltage up to 6 - 7.5 volts. Once you have a 6 - 7.5 volt supply, that can be fed into the barrel jack connector on the RedBoard and the RedBoard and shield will then create the necessary voltages needed for each.
Chris - Thank you for the info! I’ll add the boost converter into the mix.
It looks like the micro:bit + weather shield might be a better fit since ultimately I’m looking for bluetooth on the microcontroller, and the micro:bit will work off the 3.3v of the boost converter.