I connected a 3 cell AAA battery pack with an on/off switch to the connector on the Badger 2040W and it doesn’t power on. I checked for voltage at the connector on the board where the battery plugs in and I am seeing a voltage there, so I am curious if there is a button sequence to power it on? I have had it hooked to my laptop over mini usb and edited the wifi and location setting for the weather. It powers on right away on USB, is it different on battery pack?
Thanks
Dave R
Yes, exactly. When on battery power, you have to press one of these buttons for about 3-5 seconds until the firmware takes over and keeps the system powered.
Thanks for the information, I tried that and it didn’t work, I have to run some more tests and try it 2AAA.
It does not matter if you use 2 or 3 AAA batteries.
Which firmware did you install on the Badger2040W?
I upgraded the installed firmware to :pimoroni-badger2040w-v0.0.4-micropython-with-badger-os.uf2
This was happening before I upgraded.
I tested the voltage at the battery pack and at the pins on the back of the battery connector they both showed approx 4.5V
i applied voltage to Vsys and Gnd and it worked
maybe bad solder joints at the socket
i fixed it the MacGyver way … added a jumper from + on the power connector to Vsys
This will drain your battery fast, since it shortcuts the power-management of the device. The neat thing with the Badger2040w is that you can turn it off programmatically and it will not consume anything (well, besides a few µA). You can also turn it on again automatically if you program the builtin RTC before turning it off.
Now it will consume something like 30mA+ (depending on your battery voltage) even when idle, so battery life is extremely limited.
The thing many users don’t get over is the initial start when on batteries. This has to be done with a long press of one of the buttons. Yes, you wrote you did it but it turns out that this is the usual problem.
If you look at the schematic, there is an IC that controls power. It will be on when a certain IO is pulled high. The MicroPython firmware of the Badger does this for you, but it needs time to start up. So a short press is not enough. And of course you have to make sure that your program does not pull it low again (unless you explicitly want to turn the device off after doing your work). I remember there were users that just copied random pieces of code and added such a line to their program.
I will go back and try again … I thought I held it for a sufficient amount of time , but yes I noticed it didn’t sleep
I will try it again, simple matter to unsolder
thanks
I unsoldered the wire and held tried the buttons again and no joy. stumped
I would never rule out a defective unit. You should contact support and ask for a replacement, referring to this thread. I think you tried everything sensible (firmware update, checked voltages and so on).
I messaged support … so we will see what happens… since I soldered a jumper they may not… I am enjoying tinkering with it. I want to add other networks but I don’t think it uses a wpa_supplicant.conf have to read up more/
thanks for listening
No indeed. wpa_supplicant.conf is a file on a Linux system. This is a Pico-W, things work totally different here. You should check the docs for MicroPython on how to connect to networks.
Also one thing to always to be aware of: Pimoroni has it’s own flavor of the MicroPython firmware with a lot of drivers baked in. On top, there is the application program (implemented in MicroPython) they call “BadgerOS”. But in fact it is not an operating system, but only a wrapper script used to launch additional scripts (“applications”).
Unless you really need this launcher, you can just skip it and replace it with your own script. The launcher itself is nice to have since you can lookup on how Pimoroni did things and copy&paste code-snippets for your own program. In your case e.g. on how to connect to a WLAN.
I will look in to it in more depth … soon.
i have some other things, I need to do first and get back to my workshop is one.
… but the having several networks on the bade will be useful