I am creating a light meter using an arduino nano, BH1750 ambient light sensor, oled display and push buttons for use with my film camera. The arduino is to be powered from a single 18650 cell. I am going to use a TP4056 for charging and discharging of the cell. I was wondering what the best way to power the arduino using that cell is. I was thinking of using a boost converter to up the battery voltage to 5V and feed it directly into pin 27. I have seen somewhere that said if you do that and pull voltage from other pins it will overload the voltage regulator on the board. could someone please clear this up for me
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The Nano has a USB interface chip that you do not want as it wastes battery power. What you want is a Pro Mini. The Pro Mini is what you use for battery powered projects, you use a separate USB interface to program it.
If you use a 3.3 V Pro Mini (which uses an 8 MHz clock instead of a 16 MHz) then it will run directly from your 3.7 V battery. I presume your OLED requires 3.3 (or 3.7) V anyway as does the BH1750.
I presume by "pin 27" you mean the "5V" or VCC pin on the Nano. (We do not refer to pin numbers on the module.) Yes, you can feed that with 5 V or probably even 3.7 V on a Nano but it might not work reliably with the 16 MHz crystal. So you want the 3.3 V Pro Mini.
Misunderstanding there. You can overload the regulator if feeding it through the "Vin" pin - not the "5V" pin - and draw significant current, but the regulator only wastes power anyway, so you always prefer to just feed the correct voltage - which may be between 3.3 V and 5 V for the Pro Mini - to the "5V" or "VCC" pin.
Thank you Paul_B this has solved my problem.
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