Customer:
I just bought an Inkplate 2 and am wondering how I can tell if the Inkplate charged the battery fully. The Arduino API says that Battery/Voltage Level is not supported.
Is there any other way to know how charged the battery is or at least if it is fully charged?
Originally submitted via email support on 18 March 2024. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.
Soldered Support:
Unfortunately due to space limitations it wasn’t possible to add this to the hardware on the board itself.
However, you could do this with some additional circuitry: a voltage divider. We have an external project which we did this for - it’s some components soldered to a small PCB which makes this functionality possible. If you’re interested, I could provide the schematics for this. You would also have to update the Inkplate library to enable the ReadBattery function with just a few edited lines of code.
Customer:
I am quite new to tinkering with electronics but I would definitely be interested in the schematics!
Soldered Support:
I have the schematics and will send them to you.
Soldered Support:
I’ve found this simple schematic for a basic voltage divider.
The downside with this simple implementation is that it would drain extra current from the battery and thus make it last shorter. There is another schematic which has PNP and NPN transistors and an additional GPIO pin implemented. With this approach, the GPIO pin will turn the battery measurement circuit on or off, so no additional current gets drained. That schematic has some resistors for which I need to find the exact values - I’ll send it once I have them.
Soldered Support:
Here is the schematic with descriptions for how it works.
This was reverse-engineered from an older project we did, and the information should be accurate.
Attachment omitted in migration: image.png