Seeedstudio's grove base for XIAO and running on battery

ESPHome
1

Hello,

I’ve flashed ESP32C3 with ESPHome and placed it onto Grove Base for XIAO (Grove Shield for Seeed Studio XIAO with embedded battery management chip - Seeed Studio). All works fine but only if the power is supplied via USB-C port. If I connect the battery nothing happens.

This is what Seeed TechSupport team responded with:

Please remove the line `while(!Serial)` from your code. If this line is
present, the code will keep waiting for the serial connection. This is
why the device can start normally when powered by USB, but cannot start
properly when powered by battery.

I did mention ESPHome to them so I have no idea how the advice can be applied. Any ideas?

Thanks,

jose

3

Drained battery, wrong battery, bad soldering, wrong switch position?

4

tested with multiple batteries, two bases, connection checked with multimeter.

5

Define “nothing happens”.
What connections are checked?

Are you using Xiao Esp32-c3 board?

6

Turns out that in fact the board was working. It just did not give any visual indication (none of the LEDs were turned on) - a bit misleading.

7

Oh my Lord…
You prefer to waste your battery for indication LED?

8

Power led would waste battery but in case you desire

status_led:
  pin:
    number: GPIOXX
    inverted: true
1 Like
9

What’s the role of status LED in this case…?

10

To visually show unit is operating

It Is not needed for basic function but useful for troubleshooting

11

I have m5 camera with battery. I recently found better way

I use light domain for status led now and for me I had to add switch domain for ON/OFF battery as power source.

you need to remove status_led if using it since you cant resuse the gpio

light:
  - platform: binary #per https://github.com/esphome/issues/issues/2828
    name: $name LED
    output: camera_led

output:
  - platform: gpio
    pin: GPIO2        
    id: camera_led

sensor:
  - platform: wifi_signal
    name: $name WiFi Signal

  - platform: adc
    pin: GPIO38
    name: $name Battery Voltage
    filters:
        multiply: 3.3    

switch:
  - platform: gpio #per https://github.com/esphome/issues/issues/2828
    pin: GPIO33
    name: $name Battery State