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I want to set up a time-lapse system with the Witty Pi 4 L3V7, and a solar charger to charge a set of cells. My question is if I can connect the solar charger to the battery (to do the charging process when there is sun) and also, the Witty Pi 4 L3V7 directly to the battery as well (to do the discharging process to the RPi). I want to do this because the solar charger (link here) has a 5V/1A ouput so it is not enough to use a normal WittyPi4 + RPi5 (the easy solution)...so the only solution is to connect a Witty Pi 4 L3V7 directly to the battery, and try to charge it with a solar charger.
Is there any problem if the solar charger is charging the battery (voltage 4.1V approx.) and at the same time the RPi+WittyPi 4 L3V7 is switched on?
The idea is to connect a Raspberry Pi 5 to this system.
Posted : 18/04/2024 10:47 am
Firstly please be reminded that Witty Pi's software currently does not support Raspberry Pi 5 yet. The reason is the raspi-gpio utlitiy doesn't (and will never) support Raspberry Pi 5. We prevously considered to use pinctrl to replace raspi-gpio in the gpio-util.sh file, but the workload is rather big for such change. We currently think the best way is to move back to wiringPi, which is currently maintained by the community and it supports Raspberry Pi 5 too. After installing wiringPi, just commenting out the usage of gpio-util.sh will make the software working on Raspberry Pi 5. You may try this way if you don't want to wait for our official software update.
Back to your question, your configuration bypasses the charging circuit on Witty Pi 4 L3V7, which is not necessarily to be a problem if you make sure the voltage applies to your battery is no higher than 4.2V. However your configuration may not thoroughly solve the problem you want to address: If your solar charger can not deliver enough current, your battery is still being discharged and delivering current to your Pi. Eventually it will reach the undervoltage threashold and your Pi will be shut down.
Posted : 18/04/2024 1:28 pm
We have updated the software to version 4.2, and it supports Raspberry Pi 5 now.
Posted : 23/04/2024 3:38 pm