Battery

Battery and Charger

If you plan to use Espruino with a battery, a small LiPo cell and charger like those above are probably the best things to use - see below for where to find them.

  • Original Espruino boards come with a JST PHR-2 2 Pin connector for batteries
  • Espruino Pico comes with a place to solder a JST connector (or normal 0.1" pins can be used instead)
  • Pixl.js comes with a place to solder a JST connector (or normal 0.1" pins can be used instead)

The JST connector wiring is as follows:

JST wiring

Espruino itself will run from a wide range of batteries and voltages (3.6v to 15v). Some types of small batteries that can be used are:

  • Replacement phone batteries (~3.7v)
  • Model car/aircraft batteries (4.8v)
  • 4xAA or 4xAAA batteries

Adafruit has a good tutorial on different kinds of Lithium Battery

Charging

Espruino Boards do not contain a battery charger circuit (although the original Espruino revision 1v4 has a place where a MAX1551 charger IC can be soldered).

While NiCd and NiMh batteries can be safely trickle charged with a resistor, Lithium Ion batteries need to be charged properly or there may be a risk of fire. If using Lithium Ion batteries we'd suggest that you use a dedicated charger board (links below.

USB Power Packs

While USB Power packs are a cheap and convenient way to power Espruino, there are some things to be aware of:

  • Some USB Power Packs (especially the bigger ones) expect a certain amount of power to be drawn from them before they turn on properly. Espruino may draw too little power for them to notice it, and you may have to put a resistor across the supply voltage to increase the power draw enough.
  • USB power packs usually contain a Lithium Ion battery and a power supply that will convert the voltage to 5 volts. This supply may not be very efficient at supplying small amounts of power, so you may find you don't get the run-time that you'd expect given the rating of the battery.

If you're willing to open up your USB power pack, you may be able to add wires to power Espruino directly from the Lithium Ion cell. This can be especially useful when connecting Espruino to solar powered USB power packs.

Buying

Batteries

Female Connectors (for batteries)

Male Connectors (for the Espruino Pico)

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