Badger Issues - Reset and Battery Indicator

Support
#1

Got my badger yesterday and loving it so far but a couple of oddities that’s confusing me. First on battery power (2 x AAA’s in Pimoroni battery box) it’s very difficult to reset. I have tried reset plus a front panel button as advised but it seems a very randon, most times I can bel; licklijmg buttons for a while before it will reset? Reset works fine on USB and if I disconnect USB once its reset I can press buttons and access functions fine so battery is working.

The other is the battery indicator, it shows the battery symbol with a line through it, I have added launcher.py and made the voltage adjustments.

#2

Have sussed the reset thing, need to hold down a front button for a few seconds after pressing RST. Still not resolved the battery Indicator though :(

#3

Yeah, on battery power it needs a solid press on one of the front buttons to wake it up after you press reset.

If you run battery.py (pimoroni-pico/battery.py at main · pimoroni/pimoroni-pico · GitHub) it will show you the voltage reading coming from the battery so you can tweak the voltage values in launcher.py. Oh - and check you’re running the most recent version of Badger MicroPython - I think the ability to replace the built-in examples with your own was only added in 1.18.3.

#4

I added some suggested values for 2xAAA as comments in the code in battery.py in a recent pull request. As @hel mentioned, it might be worth running it connected to USB and with the battery power on, to see the values coming in on the terminal, to give you a sense of what the power actually is. It seems to be working for me now.

#5

Thank you both. I’ve run battery.py in Thonny and it reports:

Battery Voltage = 2.72061V.

I’ve input into launcher.py these values:

MAX_BATTERY_VOLTAGE = 2.8
MIN_BATTERY_VOLTAGE = 2.5

But still get the battery indicator with a cross through it? I’m running 1.18.4 btw.

#6

Hmm, odd. It will only update the battery icon in the launcher when the display is refreshed - could that be the issue?

Might also be worth checking you’ve got the most up to date launcher.py code if you’ve been tinkering with a custom version for a while?

#7

Ooh - I think I see what might be going wrong. My main.py was pointing at _launcher.py - that’s the built in version of the launcher.

Try changing the contents of main.py to import launcher so it runs your custom one with the amended battery values!

#8

Ah fantastic, thank you that fixed it for the AA’s 👍🏻

1 Like
#9

Mine says imprit _launcher already but only shows the battery with the line through. What can I do?

#10

Since the introduction of the most recent battery saving code, Badger spends most of its time turned off and the launcher mostly doesn’t stay awake long enough to get a stable voltage reading from the battery. The good news is that batteries last for absolutely ages now though - don’t think I’ve had to charge mine up since!

The software folks are having a think about what’s best to do with the battery icon, there’s an issue here if you want to track progress: Badger 2040 badger_os get_battery_level, strange behaviour · Issue #334 · pimoroni/pimoroni-pico · GitHub

You can run this example if you want to find how much charge is left in your battery: