TeleGPS-Battery-Life

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 19:23:49 -0700
tags/rockets

TeleGPS Battery Life

I charged up one of the "160mAh" batteries that we sell. (The ones we've got now are labeled 200mAh; the 160mAh rating is something like a minimum that we expect to be able to ever get at that size.)

I connected the battery to a TeleGPS board, hooked up a telemetry monitoring setup on my laptop and set the device in the window of my office. This let me watch the battery voltage through the day without interrupting my other work. Of course, because the telemetry was logged to a file, I've now got a complete plot of the voltage data:

It looks like a pretty typical lithium polymer discharge graph; slightly faster drop from the 4.1V full charge voltage down to about 3.9V, then a gradual drop to 3.65 at which point it starts to dive as the battery is nearly discharged.

Because we run the electronics at 3.3V, and the LDO has a dropout of about 100mV, it's best if the battery stays above 3.4V. That occurred at around 21500 seconds of run time, or almost exactly six hours.

We also have an "850mAh" battery in the shop; I'd expect that to last a bit more than four times as long, or about a day. Maybe I'll get bored enough at some point to hook one up and verify that guess.