11-11-2020, 05:59 PM
We've got the schematics to check, including those for the board in the battery. IIRC the wifi and modem require a battery as that's where they get their power for the radio parts due to the high current they can demand. If you want to use a generic battery you'll probably have to supply an equivalent thermistor to prevent the charge controller going into safe mode - I assume it'll do that in case of a 'failed' temperature sensor. If the battery's significantly different you'll probably need to mess with the charge controller too - see Megous' writeup for some of the things to look at. All told it's probably easiest to get an equivalent battery. Having said that you also need to take care of the antennae, and I'm not sure how many of those use a normal connector - I think there's one for the modem as someone found the cause of their reception troubles was that it wasn't connected, but I don't know about the wifi/bluetooth or GPS. The lack of a USB connector is a bit limiting and the connector there is isn't too easy to deal with - and if you need to get the board and cable you may as well have bought a Pi Zero-W.
You could probably use it for something like a sensor hub (bunch of sensors on i2c via pogo pins and/or from BLE sensors, sending MQTT messages or storing to SD, perhaps with online analysis for data reduction?), an audio player, a clock with GPS time...or something.
You could probably use it for something like a sensor hub (bunch of sensors on i2c via pogo pins and/or from BLE sensors, sending MQTT messages or storing to SD, perhaps with online analysis for data reduction?), an audio player, a clock with GPS time...or something.