Using battery with Dash v1.2 (eng sample)

Hi there,

I fear I’m lost without my trusty jumpers! So I’m attempting to power the Dash from a battery (plugged into a custom board instead of the built-in JST port) with the Vbatt and GND running to R01 and R02, respectively. When I plug into the built-in battery port the device turns on, but when I plug into my board and attempt to power through R’s 1 and 2 it does not turn on. Additionally, this setup works just fine with v1.1 - I pulled the board off a 1.1 and put on 1.2 without changing anything.

Am I doing something obviously wrong/stupid here, perhaps I have a bad dash?

Cheers,
Kevin

Hey Kevin,

The battery charging circuit on the Dash 1.2 is only available through the JST connector. Even if you provide enough voltage to L01, the V1.2 board won’t charge the battery. The motivation behind this was to make the system safer and avoid any accidental connections to the USB power input.

Also, a small change on the V1.2 is that R01 is now “VSystem_User” not VBATT.

Cheers,
Maiky

Hi Maiky,

Thank you for the clarification… That is unfortunate to hear; it seems my PCBs are “v1.1 only” at this point.

Were any other changes made to the pins? Also, do you have an updated pinout graphic for v1.2?

Cheers,
Kevin

Hey Kevin,

Sure thing.

Could you also DM me the schematics for your PCB and what its used for to see if there is a way to work around this.

All other Pins should be the same. As far as the new pinout graphic, I don’t but it will be published this week.

Cheers,
Maiky

Yeah dude I ran into this too. R01 is now tied to some “VSystem User” signal. That’s the only pin change though. Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a work around, from what I’ve been told you have to go through the JST.

The other change is the pins R18 and L18 are now SWD pins for low-level debugging if needed.

Sorry for the confusion around the battery connector. Basically what happened here was that on the 1.1 R01 had multiple meanings depending on jumper position and battery status and things like that and it was possible to cause some serious damage to the board or the battery by doing the wrong thing there. We finally got rid of the jumper which allowed us to simplify things but it meant we had to settle on one purpose for R01 and we decided to go with the safer option.

So yeah, from now you’ll have to run the battery to the JST. On the plus side, the charging capability with these board changes is much more reliable.

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Thanks for clarifying Reuben!

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