I’ve been trying to select a charger/power management solution to, in effect, make a battery backup for a Pro Mini, but it’s unclear to me from the various hookup guides and datasheets on the spark fun boards Im seeing which might be appropriate for this.
I don’t need a ton of battery life, I just need to make sure I have a reliable battery backup to keep my 3.3V pro mini running for a half hour or so in the event of a power outage, but expect it should be running the other 99% of the time from wal wart power. I understand with some modifications a pro mini can actually operate on a coin cell for a pretty long time, I’m just not having a lot of luck finding an off-the-shelf solution for this particular application…most seem to emphasize the charging part but dont get into whether they work well for a sort of Arduino UPS.
Hey tothemoonn,
While it is not ideal and not really what the board was designed for, the [SparkFun Battery Babysitter would be the best product we carry that could be made to work as a backup power supply for your project.
There are some specific configuration options outlined in our [Hookup Guide that will help you adjust the board to work more as a backup power supply than a battery charger/monitor. Specifically, the “Power-Path Management” feature of the BQ24075 and GPOUT of the BQ27441 charge IC can be configured to make the Battery Babysitter act as a kind of backup battery.
We do not have much more information regarding how you would configure this outside of our hookup guides but the datasheets for the [BQ24075 Charger and [BQ27441-G1 Fuel Gauge along with the [GitHub Repository will have some more information that may help you configure it for your specific application.
I hope this helps you decide if SparkFun has the right part for your application. If you have any other questions about the Battery Babysitter, please reply to this post and we would be happy to help as much as we can.](GitHub - sparkfun/Battery_Babysitter: Charge management and monitoring breakout for single-cell lithium polymer batteries.)](https://cdn.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Prototyping/bq27441-g1.pdf)](https://cdn.sparkfun.com/assets/learn_tutorials/5/3/0/bq24075.pdf)](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/battery-babysitter-hookup-guide)](SparkFun Battery Babysitter - LiPo Battery Manager - PRT-13777 - SparkFun Electronics)