I'm relatively new to this, and I was wondering how people have been powering their battery powered projects, as well as what kind of batteries/hardware to use.
To start off with, I have two projects in mind:
Project A:
1 controller controlling a strip of 30 WS2813 LEDs:
5V system
Needs to be low size/weight and/or balanced
Bluetooth controlled color sequence (to choose colors)
Ideally 1-3 hour life on a full charge
Expecting impacts (There may be some protection hardware to protect against it)
doesn't have to be as restricted as above project, but should be reasonably handheld
Potential to act as a spare USB battery
I am planning on using DFRobotic's Beetle BLE for both projects (for size)
I'm not entirely sure what the best way of powering both these components would be:
Is having AA batteries in parallel and Converted/Regulated to 5V the best option?
Should I worry about using LiPos in these projects as they are a much more fragile/finicky type of battery that requires a significant amount of attention?
Should I worry about the current drain of the microcontroller itself and provide circuitry for turning on and off the microcontroller?
Thanks in advance!
PS: Do these things have native onboard read/write capabilities, or do I need an SD card or something to write/read from a text file? (For example, if I wanted to change the lights in project A to have a purple pattern, from a fully white pattern, is it possible to have the change persist upon restart of the microcontroller?)
AAs batteries in parallel would output 1.5 volts which is far from the required 5 volts. you might want to series a bunch of them to add up their voltage to 6 volts (1.5v*4 = 6v assuming alcaline batteries). Depending on the board you are using, 6V as an input might be perfectly acceptable. Please specify you boards model so I can help you more with this.
LiPos are great but as you say, they require more attention. Might not be the best choice if they could be exposed to big variations of temperature and/or impacts.
In autonomous designs every micro amps count as they can result in a lot more time in action before going out. If you could specify what type of board you are using, maybe it has an integrated "Sleep" function that would help you a lot.
Response to PS.: Again no board specified here... In most case you could use EEPROM which is a special type of persistent memory. Keep in mind that EEPROM have a very limited Read/Write life of about 10 000 cycles if my memory serves me correctly.
I put together a project where a ESP32, TFMini LIDAR and 9 ALITOVE WS2812B Addressable 5050 smart RGB LED Pixel lights are used. I, doing a silly experiment, used a DROK voltage regulator Amazon.com adjusted to produce 7.8 volts, into a 7805 and the 5V is sent to power the project. I am using 2 Tenergy 188650's, 2600mAh, wired in series. On a set of batteries that were charged in July, that sat in the bottom of a parts bin since then, I have got over 8 hours of continuous run time and still going.