As promised yesterday, here is some more info on how to use the new AA Power board.

You’ve already seen the “inline” mode, using an Alkaline cell this time:

The second main mounting option is in piggy-back mode, flipped over and mounted on the back of a JeeNode:

This can be done either with regular male header pins (1×6 and 2×4, or 3×4), or with extra long pins which will stick out the front of the JeeNode as normal header pins:

Doing so requires some care, because once these two boards are soldered back-to-back, you can’t reach everything anymore. Disassembling such a sandwich later is tricky.

Note that you can stand the whole assembly on empty AA battery clips, but once a battery is inserted, this becomes unstable because the round battery sticks out:

With AAA clips and the much thinner (and weaker) AAA battery, it turns out that the whole construction does stand upright, but the size and position of the clips gives it limited stability when adding plugs on top.

There is a third option – use the AA Power board on top of a JeeNode with stacking headers, i.e. like a “shield”:

There is not that much room, but the 4 port headers can still be used. Note that the AA Power board needs to be mounted upside down in this case, i.e. with the SMD components and the silk screen facing down towards the JeeNode. Here’s another view of this shield-style option:

Coming up… a description of the full range of power connections supported by this little magician.