CR2032s Are Out

I'm finding that this name tag eats up a lot of CR2032 batteries and the brightness of my LEDs is limited by the amount of current those batteries can source. The next version will be LiPo powered.

Switching to a LiPo battery will not only be a little easier to work with than swapping out coin cells but also I might eventually be able to make the backlit version work with more current going to each of the LEDs.

Learning Battery Stuff

I've done some research on what's needed to use a LiPo battery and the consensus seems to be that there are three extra components needed:

• Battery charging circuit
• Overcharge protection
• Overdischarge protection

The first two can be combined into a single chip. I looked around and decided to go with an MCP73812T. I'm honestly not sure how I arrived at that as an option, but the datasheet makes it seem like it'll work for my purposes. I could be totally wrong about this, so you might not want to imitate me.

The last one, overdischarge protection, seems to be a separate part. I found that the LiPo battery I ordered (ASR00007 from TinyCircuits) already has overdischarge and overcharge protection, so I won't be adding a separate component for that.

Next

I've ordered all of the parts, so the next step is to model all of the footprints in Eagle and put together the schematic.