Huzzah32 Feather Works From USB But Not LiPO

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drewc228
 
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Huzzah32 Feather Works From USB But Not LiPO

Post by drewc228 »

Hi, although this topic has been dealt with several times in the past the topics are now locked so I am posting a new thread on this key issue. With the huge move to IoT and mobile devices it's natural to want to run microcontrollers like ESP32 on newer large capacity LiPOs. My device, a multi-sensor air quality monitor , runs the latest Huzzah32 Feather with a variety of I2C connected sensors including GPS and draws nominally about .28 Ah. With an Adafruit 3.7V 2800 mAh LiPo I can get around 8-10 hours of battery life which is sufficient for this application. The device talks to Blynk via WiFi.
My issue here is that although the device seems to work as designed when powered through the USB, with a fully charged LiPO battery it consistently fails quickly (ie, reboots) when initializing, usually at WiFi begin. Voltage and current monitoring show no material drops or surges, though I haven't looked at it with a 'scope or logic analyzer.
[[Some possible design clues:
> The design leans heavily on the I2C bus...I am not currently using the UART pins or any GPIOs;
> I am using the Feather 128X64 OLED also with I2C (great display!);
> I use the EN pin to power ON/OFF the device although I see the same behavior with/without;
> I am using the AdaFruit-advised A13 battery monitoring method (even though I have recently seen, to my dismay, that A13/GP35 uses ADC1 which we all know by now will not work in conjunction with WiFi which this device uses continuously. I have disabled this function but it didn't seem to have an effect.
> The circuit works well with LiPo battery with a Heltec ESP32 WiFiKit chip. I am moving away from the Heltec due to the battery monitoring issue (is this an ESP32-wide problem? Does anyone have a way to do this reliably?)
> The Huzzah32 I am using is about a year old...has there been a more recent design change that might fix my issue?
Any thoughts as to what is going on here, or what I might do differently?
Thanks!

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