Sunny Buddy charge question

Components & Accessories Power
1

I’m currently using the Sunny Buddy with the 6 watt panel and a 1000 mah battery all from SF. This seems to work well enough, but when charging in full sun, it always stops charging at about 3.9 V (measured on my Particle Argon). I think the measurement is accurate as when the voltage drops below about 3.3V, the unit cuts out waiting for a new charge, which seems about right to me. So, the question is, do I have to do something else to the buddy to let it charge to the max battery capacity? I think that should be ~4.2V, correct?

Thanks.

2

I’m not sure why this design decision was made, but the Sunny Buddy doesn’t fully recharge a Lipo battery.

If I had to guess, we were being conservative on the charge voltage to prolong battery lifetime and prevent an accidental lipo fire in case of an overvoltage/over charge situation but I don’t know that for sure.

Sadly the engineer that came up with the design is no longer at SparkFun so I can’t ask.

3

Crumb, that makes it harder to use. I appreciate the notice.