Inkplate 5 Gen2 battery options and reading battery status in Arduino

TECHNICAL SUPPORT Inkplate
1

Customer:

I have several questions about the Inkplate 5 Gen2 with e-paper and enclosure:

  • Is a battery included in this product?
  • Which batteries can be used inside the enclosure?
  • If using a 5000 mAh 3.7 V lithium battery, can it be charged just by plugging in a USB power supply?
  • In Arduino, can I read the battery status (voltage and state of charge)?

Originally submitted via email support on 8 January 2025. Migrated to the forum for community visibility.

2

Soldered Support:

The Inkplate 5 Gen2 with e-paper and enclosure does not include a battery. You need the “With e-Paper, enclosure and battery” version (SKU 333336) for that.

You can use li-ion 3.7V batteries. The ones that fit the enclosure perfectly are 1200mAh batteries. If you modify the enclosure, you can fit larger batteries.

Yes, the battery charges when Inkplate is connected via USB automatically and starts draining when unplugged from USB.

You can read the battery voltage using the inkplate.readBattery() function in the system.h file, which returns a float of the battery value. See the implementation here: Inkplate-Arduino-library/src/include/System.cpp at 2dd263f2f9548aadac8638413a143beddf068a64 · SolderedElectronics/Inkplate-Arduino-library · GitHub

Note that there is a known bug with readBattery() on some Inkplate 5 models. If you encounter issues with this function, please let us know and we can provide a fix in the library.