After yesterday’s post about switching to OptiBoot, I decided to go one step further and go for a self-powered solution, a bit like this unit which has been serving me well for many months now.

So here’s the “Opti-rebooter” with a 400 mAh LiPo backpack:

Hookup is trivial, given that the JeeNode USB has an on-board LiPo charger. I picked a battery which matches the width of the board and fits quite well:

The two connectiosn of the LiPo battery are wrapped up in heat-shrink tubing to prevent accidental short circuits – the currents involved could easily cause trouble. Note that this is a “raw” LiPo cell, without any protection circuitry. That’s fine in this case, because the on-board circuitry takes care of charging.

To make this complete, the isp_repair.pde was extended to completely power down when done. So there’s no need for an on-off switch, the idle consumption is probably lower than the battery’s own self-discharge rate. And it blinks the on-board led twice: once on power up and once when properly programmed. Very convenient!

The way to use this thing, is: connect to a target JeeNode / JeeLink / Arduino, press the RESET button, wait three seconds, disconnect, done.

I also made changes to the very similar but slightly more elaborate isp_prepare.pde sketch, which was presented in this weblog post.

The updated isp_prepare.pde sketch supports a number of variations. These can be configured by adjusting a few values at the start of the sketch:

You can choose which type of boot loader to install, which sketch to load initially (just to start off, this can be overwritten later), and there’s a third option to adjust some “fuse bits” in the ATmega to select how fast the ATmega can start up after resuming from a power down.

That third option is particularly useful with battery-powered JeeNodes using the RF12 driver. With USE_FAST_WAKEUP set to 1, the power-up sequence is fast enough for an ATmega to wake up when the first data byte is received. This means you can completely power down the ATmega (while leaving the receiver running), and it’ll still be able to pick up incoming packets and respond to them. There is one gotcha: USE_FAST_WAKEUP can only be set to 1 on units running with a resonator – JeeLinks and Arduino’s running with a crystal must be not use the fast wakeup mechanism, as the clock may not start up properly in this case.

Haven’t tried it though – for now, that LiPo powered unit shown above is really the most convenient way for me to upgrade all the JeeNodes, JeeLinks, and Arduino’s floating around the house at JeeLabs.