I just went to pick up my LiFePO4wered/Pi panels at Colorado Tech Shop, here's what 250 little boards in hand looks like:

Now it's up to me to start building some up!
Meanwhile, I've been hard at work on the firmware. I discovered that due to some recent changes, the off current had increased from 8 to ~50 uA. Not good! I found the problem and fixed it. In the process, I also implemented a system tick prescaler, since the system was running the touch detection and ADC conversions more often than necessary. Result: average off current is now reduced to 4-5 uA! :)
I also worked on the wake up timer calibration. At first my idea had been that I could make the user read a calibration value register, which would allow them to calculate a wake up time to set, based on that value. In the process of writing the code, it became obvious that I could just as well handle all the calibration in the firmware and just allow the user to set the number of minutes. Much better! Wake up accuracy has improved from a factor of 10 worst case to +/-10-15%.
At the moment I'm working on the Pi-side software, to allow it to deal correctly with multiple register set versions so earlier prototypes keep working and future firmware changes won't cause issues with older boards.
Patrick Van Oosterwijck
Discussions
Become a Hackaday.io Member
Create an account to leave a comment. Already have an account? Log In.