IoT Mailbox: Solar Battery Chargers & System Power Supplies

Summary

In the last Article I talked about my Mailbox problem.  My original plan was to have this device powered with a coin cell.  As I discussed the project with my lab assistant, Nicholas, he asked why it wasn’t going to be solar powered.  I didn’t have a good answer for this question.  This basic question led me down a multi-week deep dark rabbit hole.  For a while (weeks?) I am going to write about my experiences building a solar power supply for my board.  Ideally I want this architecture:

In words, I want to power the system at 3.3v from a battery, USB or a solar cells.  And, I want the solar cell and/or the USB to charge the LiPo battery.  It turns out that I don’t/didn’t know much about:

  1. Solar Cells
  2. Charging LiPo batteries – or in fact batteries
  3. Buck-Boost / Buck Convertors
  4. Super Capacitors

And it turns out that there is an unbelievably large number of PMIC combinations that might work.  Unfortunately, Cypress does not make one.  We do make an Energy Harvesting Boost Convertor, but nothing that can do battery charging.  The last things that surprised me about this whole thing is that the normal maker suspects (Adafruit, SEEED Studio and Sparkfun) don’t really make good breakout boards that meet my architecture needs.

My current plan is to:

  1. Research, buy and evaluate “a bunch” of different evaluation kits from the usual suspects (Ti, Analog, Linear, ST and Maxim)
  2. Document a comparison of the offerings
  3. Write about charging batteries
  4. Write about solar cells (How you use them?  Where do you buy them? How do you test them?)
  5. Write about buck-boost convertors
  6. Design the power supply for my IoT board

Solar Battery Charging PMICs

I started this whole process by making a google sheet with all of the characteristics that I care about.  I made the sheet public so that you can see the current version.

If you look in the spreadsheet you will notice that there are some holes.  And there are Im sure some missing rows.  If you know the answer to any of the open questions, or have other PMICs you are interested in, please either make a comment on this Article or send me an email at engineer@iotexpert.com

Development Kits

As you can see from the picture  below, I have a bunch of development kits.  Some were built by Semiconductor companies, some were built by third parties.  I have chips from Analog, Linear, Microchip, TI and ST.  There is one interesting company in China called Consonance (which I dont have boards for),  In addition, Fujistsu Electronics also makes a IC that I don’t have yet.

In the picture you can see that I have LTC3331, LTC3106, TI BQ25507, TI BQ25570, TI BQ24210, Microchip MCP73871, ST SPV1050 … for now.

In the coming articles look for detailed instructions on these chips, starting with the LTC3331.

Article Description
IoT Mailbox Introduction An introduction to the long series of articles about creating a new IoT System.
IoT Mailbox: Solar Battery Chargers & System Power Supplies