Nov 2, 2022
Add a LiPo Battery Charger to the Wio-E5 Mini
The Wio-E5 Mini from Seeed Studio is a compact usb/battery-driven LoRa-E5 board but there’s no battery charging option so here’s how to add one easily.
The absolutely simplest approach is to go to Adafruit (or Sparkfun or …) and buy a small USB battery charger from them. I bought the #4410 model as seen above. It uses a typical 5-pin chip and charger circuit.
The Mini-E5 battery input is switched off when there’s a 5V input from USB. See below where transistor Q1 turns off the VBAT input when there’s 5V USB present.
Since attaching a USB device to the Mini-E5 will turn off the battery supply we can use any old charger circuit with the battery VBat+ going straight to the Mini-E5. Without the switching transistor we’d run the risk of the charger being confused by the added current draw of the running circuit.
I simply stuck the Mini-E5 and the Adafruit charger into a patch board and then wired 5V & Gnd to the charger from the Mini-E5 and then VBat from the charger to the Mini-E5 VBat+ hole. Voila: instant Feather.
