I love ESPHome and have loads of sensors throughout my home. I would now like to move outside. I watch the GreatScott YouTube channel a lot and I’m slowly trying to build something myself but I would be interested to see if what I’m after is actually being sold off-the-shelf. What I’m looking for is a charging/buck/boost converter which supports the following:
Charge one or two 18650 batteries
Charge using Solar Panels (6 or 9v)
Stable 5V supply to power my ESP home devices
All necessary user/overpower protection circuits to make sure my batteries don’t explode
GreatScott build this device, which comes very close and which I’m trying to build myself but I wonder if you can actually buy something similar online?
@Spiro - Just received my units and they look great. I guess you just connected your solar panels to the Micro USB input (U4) to charge the batteries or did you do anything more clever?
Yes, solar panel to the micro usb (be careful as usb easy to tear off) and make sure you put the battery in the correct way round. Do it wrong once and it will blow the board. As they are cheap boards from China some of them didn’t work at all.
All the ones I have used before have been version 3. The last one I got was a version 8 with 4 cell slots. That causes a problem sometimes. When you disconnect the charger / sun not on panel anymore it switches the power off to the esp for 2-3 seconds. As I use deep sleep most of the time, it was a while before I caught on. Sometimes in this new device it had to be restarted by pressing a little white button which isn’t on the V3 models. Also had to put the switch on the other side on even though I was drawing power from the 3.3V pins.
Most times you have to charge the battery a little (usually just a few seconds) in the board to get it to switch on the power to the pins. That caught me out when I first got it.
I soldered an old usb cable to solar panel and connected to a USB on-the-go cable as had no spare usb micro cable to connect directly to the solar panel.
@Spiro - I bought two, one single and one double and the double one doesn’t seem to work. The 4 LED’s on the back light up (all 4) when charging and reach fully charged. But I soldered two sets of pins 3 & 5 V to the side and neither give a voltage. Pushed buttons / flicked switches but no voltage. The single-battery one works fine. Have you seen this or is it just broken?
