Recharging Battery

[Octavio Gonzalez Guerra V]

Hey there!

I'm Octavio Vazquez, an undergrad research assistant for one of the labs of the Neuroscience Program at the University of Wyoming. I'm just starting to test this device. It seems robust!

A lot of my other questions were answered by reading other people's posts. You're so good at replying! Thank you!

I only have two questions. I hope they're not silly.

How do we properly recharge the ICR18650 battery?

I read here (https://groups.google.com/g/fedforum/c/qYZgEGNjp7Q/m/MPYlJgL5CAAJ ) that we leave it plugged to the Feather Board. That means we change its port connection from the PCB to the Adafruit board to charge it, right?

The second one: How long does the battery would usually last?

Thanks again,

Octavio Vazquez

ogon...@uwyo.edu

[FEDforum]

Thanks Octavio!  Great questions:

1) To charge the internal battery you can plug the FED3 in by either microUSB port (yellow arrows below), leaving the battery plugged in.  Either port will charge the battery at the same rate, the external one is usually easier to access.  You don't have to unplug anything to charge the battery this way.  To fully charge the battery through the Adalogger board it will take ~40 hours, although if you purchased from OEPS they added a resistor to cut this down to ~20 hours.

You can also remove the battery and recharge it outside of the device.  In my lab we have lots of spare batteries and we charge them outside of the device using this simple little charger, which can charge it in ~10 hours.  The battery is a 4400mAh from Adafruit if you want to buy a spare. 

2) The battery life will depend on how it's being used and the task being run.  Basically the motor is the biggest power hog so if you dispense more pellets in your task you will get less battery life.  But roughly you can expect a 1 week battery life for normal use. 

Hope this helps! -Lex

[Zengyou Ye]

Hi Lex,

Regarding the battery charging, can I keep connecting to microUSB during the recording, to keep the battery on charge all the time?

Best,

Zengyou

[Lex]

Yup! There's no problem with leaving it plugged in.  You will need a battery in the FED3 to power the motor but you can leave the device connected by USB so you don't have to worry about charging it. Best,  -Lex

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[Zeng-You Ye]

Thanks Lex. It’s great we can do the recording and charging at the same time, since we need to keep recording for a continuous 20 days without interruptions.

Best,

Zengyou

On Dec 26, 2023, at 15:25, Lex <lex.k...@gmail.com> wrote:



[Lex]

Sounds like a fun experiment! 

We keep extra batteries (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1781) on external chargers for situations like this and swap the batteries every week during long term experiments like this. So that's another option!