Li-po batteries are here!

There was a card from the post office, hidden under the welcome mat at Nerd Towers, saying that they'd been delivered a few days ago. So after a quick trip to the sorting office, they were proudly displayed on one of our workbenches. Here's a photo of the prototype batteries with charge circuits, from Xing at NuElectronics:



The charge circuits include over/under voltage protection, to keep the li-po cells operating within safe limits as well as a step-up converter, to provide a regulated 5v output from the 3.7v cell. As you can see from the photo, they're just being charged up at the minute. As soon as they're ready for use, we'll see how they perform (with our SureScore Golf device). We'll try one with our current device (which includes software-controlled auto-standby after two minutes of inactivity) and one with a modified device with no auto-standby code: this should give us a good idea of the kinds of times we can expect our devices to run for between charges in both "normal" and "continuous" use modes.