ESP32-S3 PowerFeather: Low power, solar capable, Li-ion/LiPo Powered Dev Board

[powerfeatherdev]

Hello all,

I want to introduce ESP32-S3 PowerFeather, a dev board that should make it a little easier to create solar + Li-ion/LiPo powered projects! It uses a charger IC that's smarter than most other similar boards: Texas Instruments BQ25628E; and also has an on-board LC709204F fuel gauge. Deep-sleep current can be under 20 uA. It has an Arduino/ESP-IDF SDK to help manage the use of the charger and fuel gauge, as well as the other power-related features. More details and link to documentation can be found on: https://powerfeather.dev/.

[powerfeatherdev]

Since the release of ESP32-S3 PowerFeather I’ve been working on a demo web app that lets users explore some of the features of ESP32-S3 PowerFeather, which I recently got to a decent state:



The web app is served from the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather (acting as an AP) and is accessed from the tablet's web browser. The part encircled in yellow shows the battery being charged at 1.5 A from the solar panel at the set MPP voltage of around 12 V.

The web app also displays other supply & battery telemetry information as well as some power management controls which are all built-in into the board and accessed using the PowerFeather-SDK API.

For those interested in the demo web app, maybe to try it on their PowerFeather or just to see how this was created: https://github.com/PowerFeather/powerfeather-demo.

[powerfeatherdev]

I made a showcase video for the ESP32-S3 PowerFeather: https://youtu.be/VF9AFk1Hf88

[tszaboo]

Nice job on the board and the documentation. It's not easy to make something like this happen, and it shows that you put a lot of effort in it. Good luck selling it.

[powerfeatherdev]

Thank you for the kind words!

[tooki]

It looks really nice. Any chance of getting it to the big distributors (DigiKey, Mouser, Farnell, Reichelt, etc.)?

(This matters because they’re all big enough that they take care of local VAT, whereas importing from smaller vendors means major surprise fees from customs.)