battery or supercap for rtc and sync?

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1

I love this little device. thanks to jason and team for putting this together.

I have only one feature suggestion (complaint): I wish there was a teeny battery or supercapacitor on this device.

first, I would prefer to keep the RTC running on powerdown. second, and more importantly, with a battery, it could provide 5 seconds of power after a powerdown to flush (sync) buffers to the sd card, so I would not have to constantly flush buffers manually in order to have my data logged before my robot ran into the wall. having to flush manually constantly slows down what I can do tremendously.

ok, I admit that I am not the ideal target user for which the BBB was designed. I am not a hardware enthusiast. however, another $10 for a version of the BBB with a battery already built-in and just 5 seconds of guaranteed power (or, even better, a powerdown signal to the OS and 5 seconds) would be ideal for me.

is there a chance that a small battery could make it into the next revision?

/iaw

2

You would be better off just adding an external RTC. There are capes available that add a RTC. Any battery that was adequate to keep the board up for shutdown would be more than a typical RTC would require. The isn’t enough space on the board to add a rechargeable battery that large.

I have no plans to make these changes, but thanks for the input.

Gerald

3

thank you, gerald. very helpful to know what is in the cards and what is not.