Hey there! I’d love to add a battery backup to the Airgradient ONE so I can periodically take it off the power supply and measure air quality in a different room. I was going to feed the power right into the USB C jack to make it easier, but I’m wondering if I should directly solder to any of the power contact points on the PCB instead. I’d love to figure out how to manage the battery so that it’s maintained in a healthy state of charge when “parked” on the charger and then switches over to battery power only when unplugged.
Also, I see that the recommended power supply is 5V x 2A. What’s the actual needed power input? There’s some good Adafruit battery boards that can do 5V x 1A, and I’m not sure if the Airgradient assembly actually needs all 10W of the 5V x 2A that’s recommended.
Any power bank should work. 2A is the peak consumption and on average it should need a lot less.
@Achim_AirGradient to clarify, I’m hoping to wire in a LiPo pack and charging circuitry so that I can leave it plugged in and then unplug it when I need it in a different room intermittently. Totally understood that I can power it off a power bank, but I was planning on remixing the back enclosure, etc. and making it all integrated.
If I’m doing this approach, where should I supply the power input? to the jack or to some points on the board? Is there an actual specified power draw that’s needed? If it’d be happy with 5W, I can pretty easily source a few components to make this work. Thanks!
Earlier board revisions had a header designed for a charging hat, but it has since been dropped. I think you’ll have to figure out where to best put the power and such, since this board isn’t designed with that in mind.
The KiCad files show all of the traces, so you can mod it however you see fit to go down this road
Got it, thank you! Excited to receive this unit soon - looks like it just shipped!!
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Just to add here why we dropped it.
The extra header made the tracing of the PCB very complex with much longer traces etc. this can negatively impact the performance of for example the I2C bus.
We had issues with this in pre 4.2 versions of the board.
Thank you for the context!