I am running a 12V fan powered by LI-ion battery pack (11.1V mAh 57.72wh) with an arduino doing PWM control. There is a DC to DC to convert (5V 500ma out thru) the 11.1V to 5 V to power the arduino from the battery pack.
My question is, can I charge the battery while the arduino is running? Or I will have to power off the arduino then charge it.
My charger is a smart charger that has 4V to 16V auto-detection with 1 A.
My worry is connecting arduino with the system while charging, it may affect the charging in negative way but I am not sure how I can confirm that.
This is my first post, I tried my best to find which section fits best, if I am in the wrong place please let me know.
My charger is a smart charger that has 4V to 16V auto-detection with 1 A.
This confuses me. I use several different LiPo chargers and this spec does not ring any bells.
Can you post a link to that charger?
If you have access to mains power to run the charger, why not simply use mains to run a power supply?
Another possible solution - get 2 batteries. Run off of one until it is low. Swap batteries. Connect the one that was just swapped out to the charger and charge. Repeat.
unfortunately the system needs to work modularly, get recharged when it's low on battery. Also removing battery is not an ideal option.
I am hoping to create something like a ordinary rechargeable device, unfortunately I know very little about battery charging, not so much luck searching online either.
If someone could point me to a good source to learn about this it would also be super helpful.
Lithium batteries are charged using a Constant Current/Constant Voltage (CC/CV)method. That means they rely on the current delivered in the CV stage reducing until the charger decides the battery is completely full.
The only problem you may have is that because the Arduino is taking current out of the battery as it's being charged the charger may never actually realise that it's completed the charge and show "fully charged". That's unlikely to be much of a problem. It basically just means that for some of the time you may actually be running the Arduino from the charger rather than the battery.