Hello. I'm needing to build a temperature monitoring system that will be deployed to a remote location with no electricity. It will need to run on batteries and self charge via solar panel and send data via cellular network to our server.
I'm looking at ordering some components to get started. MKR 1400 looks good. I read that it has a charging circuit built in but I'm having difficulty finding information about how this circuit works and how I use it exactly.
Is it as simple as connecting the battery to the board's Barrel Jack, and the solar panel (regulated to 5v output) to the board's USB port?
As documented on the MKR 1400 page, the battery will need to supply power to the board during http requests because not enough current can be supplied via USB for that.
Realistically the board will only be powered up once every 10 or 20 minutes to send data, and sleep in between. Can I program the charging circuit to only charge from USB during sleep? If so, how? Is there documentation somewhere? I'm asking this question because as far as I can gather, the battery can't supply power when it is being charged.
Thanks for any help with this, really looking forward to getting started with my first Arduino project!