Hi everyone, I want to create a weather station project with a Heltec WiFi Lora 32 V3 using several sensors and Solar cell with battery management. Do I need a charging board to connect a 3.7V battery and solar cell. If not, do I simply connect a 3.7V battery to a solar cell?
Thank you!
How to connect Solar cell and 3.7V Li battery to Heltec Lora 32 V3
Connect the positive lead from the solar cell to the 5V pin of the board (it’s not a bad idea to include a reverse current protection diode in that circuit) and the negative to one of the GND pins. All of the Heltec boards I’ve used, including the WiFi LoRa 32, include battery management circuitry that will manage the charging of a battery connected to the JST/Molex 1.25 connector on the bottom of the board using the source voltage provided through either the USB connector or the 5V (or on the CubeCell boards, the Vs) pin.
According to its schematic diagram, the V3.2 board includes entirely new battery management circuitry that is quite different to all the previous iterations of this board. While I’ve not used one of these to date, I don’t believe that the configuration of the solar panel and battery would be any different to what is described above.