Good morning!
We are just sorting out adding PiJuice hats to our Fins, and was hoping you could provide your verdict on power supplies.
The reported status for the battery:
pijuice.status.GetStatus()
{‘data’: {‘isFault’: False, ‘isButton’: False, ‘battery’: ‘NORMAL’, ‘powerInput’: ‘NOT_PRESENT’, ‘powerInput5vIo’: ‘BAD’}, ‘error’: ‘NO_ERROR’}
The powerInput5vIo value, as you can see, is BAD; this is using the fin with the standard PSU supplied with it at 12V/1.5A. The documentation isn’t exactly clear about what BAD means in terms of charging at all vs very little. After two days, I wouldn’t expect the battery level to be reporting at only 54%. Though, I have only recently begun reporting battery levels so maybe it was lower and is (very) slowly charging - I will keep an eye on it.
Do you have approximate charging time figures we should be expecting?
Another topic briefly mentioned the PiJuice being fine with any PSU at around 5V/2A. Can you suggest and/or provide other more suited PSUs for use with a Fin/PiJuice combo?
Yet another topic covered the PiJuice fitting within the standard Fin enclosure (answer was simply to use the Phoenix ring case, which we have no plan to use).
In the standard case it’s… tight. Could do with being just like 1-2mm taller to allow it without the bulging, but it’s passable without.
I mention this because you also have an issue with the width of the case and the SIM slot - I don’t know if this has been reported yet.
There is something approaching zero space between the case and the SIM card - with the side of the case being plastic, and therefore flexible.
If someone has picked the unit up from a particularly unlucky side (or hit in transit, or assembles the unit without due care), this can have - and has had - the unfortunate effect of very slightly disengaging the SIM card. In this minuscule deviation from the contacts after ejection, it seems to actually brick the SIM card. We lost two cards before discovering this particular fault.
For any reading this with a similar issue, we do have a simple, temporary solution:
We have made use of the micro-SIM adapter that the core nano-SIM was supplied within. This is thin enough (~1mm) and obviously fits around the nano-SIM sizing to be able to put it around the SIM slot and between it and the casing.
This protects the SIM from falling foul of even fairly determined flexing as it reduces the target area to only about 1cm, and with a smaller area comes a lessened ability to bend it enough to actively hit the SIM card.
Do you have any plans already in the works for modifying your existing casing that may or may not include such changes? Are you likely to? I can understand leaving the height, disappointing as it would be, but the sizing for the SIM is something that we feel should not be ignored.