ChessUp2 Board Battery and Indicator Light discussion

Just wanted to know what the initial startup procedure is for ChessUp2. I have been charging the unit for almost 2 hours now and the red light is still just blinking. I’m guessing it will eventually turn green when its charged correct? Just waiting for it to fully charge before turning it on for the first time. I know in the email it said that there won’t be an instruction book with the beta, but one will he published shortly.

Cheers

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I’ve had the same experience. Appears to stop drawing significant watts when fully charged though still blinking red.

This weekend I’m going to play with different USB-C cords and chart the watts consumed, see if it’s fully charged but just not disabling the light. Will submit a report through the proper channel once I have more data.

Looking forward to seeing your results.

It would be nice if the light wasn’t blinking. If playing while plugged in, having a blinking light in the corner of your eye seems distracting. It would be nice if it was solid red when charging, then change to yellow when charged to 85-90% and then green when fully charged. Then at least if you are in a hurry, you could stop the charge once the light turns yellow.

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Two things:

  1. If the brick is < 10 watts it can be an issue
  2. 80%+ charge happens in 2 hours and then it is a slower charge to top off

But actually we would like to discuss it all here and I will loop in the hardware folks and make sure all is as expected

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The UI has a battery gauge. You can turn on the device and see the charge amount - which is way better than a 3 state LED.

Also it has a really long battery life, so even plugging it in for 1~2 hours will allow for a lot of play when removed from the charger

As Jeff mentioned, we recommend a greater than or equal to 10 watt (5V, 2A) charger to charge the battery. The battery charging goes in stages and will draw a different amount of current during those stages. This helps to protect the battery. The last few percent of the battery can take a long time to finish. It will turn green once it finishes topping off the battery. If you turn on your ChessUp there will be a battery indicator showing the state of charge. That is pretty accurate. If the LED turns solid red that means there was a charge fault. This usually happens if the charger is insufficient to charge the battery in a reasonable amount of time.

I tried two different chargers with the included cable. The first charger was 20W and the second charger was 10W, I only plugged it into the 10W for a few minutes to see if the light did anything different. I have a 25W charger arriving today that I will keep with the board as a dedicated charger. After 3 hours of charging it was still blinking red, I decided to unplug it and turn it on. The battery icon on the screen showed a full battery.

The 10 W and 25 W should both work the same. Our battery is a 4000 mAh capacity and charges at 0.5 C (meaning it draws at most 2 amps at 5 volts). 2 A * 5 V = 10 W. Anything bigger will work too, but still be limited to 2 amp charging with the ChessUp 2.

For you, the battery is probably at like 98% or such and there is no drawback to unplugging it there.

I think a lot of people are afraid of battery memory issues. Years ago - it used to be best to fully charge it, fully discharge it. This is no longer true with modern rechargeable batteries. You can partially charge, partially discharge and the battery life span will not be impacted.

The led indicator is more useful to let you know to take it off the charger when full. But if you have it on for 2 hours, it has plenty of charge too.

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@Jeff @JustinF

Roger that. It was a 35W brick I was using without any tracking and a 30W when I was able to see the output. Figured disabling the indicator light when full was just a pending feature.

Thanks also for the insight about charge memory.

That battery indicator on the UI works excellently. I’m still going to run it empty and track the wattage as I charge, just to put it through its paces.

This is a CLEAN design you guys have implemented. The kids and I had fun last night seeing how it reacts to check, notification that you can’t make a legal move during check vs when attempting an illegal move during check, etc. Looking forward to exploring more. Thank you again for letting us help with the beta testing.

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@PBK_Studio , since this thread is becoming primarily battery and indicator talk, may I suggest editing the title so it’s easiest for others to reference as it grows? Cutting down on duplicate threads may be helpful in time to come.

@Brewer good idea

Mine did turn green after a while. I have a 20w usb C block which is more than fine for this.

But after basicly a hour of charge, it was close to 99% full. And this thing barely drains. I have been testing some features on it for a good hour, and the battery is still going on strong.

Pretty amazing.

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Have you devs considered an option to display battery percentage? I always prefer it on phones and laptops.

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Great question - and the current answer is that we don’t think our battery gauge is accurate enough to get down to 1% level of accuracy.

It is a good battery gauge, but not great (like a phone). So I think we will research this a bit more, but most likely it is going to move in bigger chunks (10%, 25%, etc) with pop up messages.

However, we do want to hear feedback like this. When there is a chance to improve the user experience, we will look into it and hopefully apply a lot of these suggestions.

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Is it possible for the user to replace the battery with something higher-capacity than 4000 mAh?

I also noticed that the screen and LEDs are very bright. It might be nice to be given the option to adjust the brightness of both. The current brightness isn’t a problem to my eyes, but I’m wondering if dimming it might be an effective way to extend the battery life further–maybe significantly.

It isn’t recommended to replace the battery. It should have a good battery life during normal use.
The board has a built-in ambient light sensor (ALS) which will be used to adjust the brightness automatically to help battery life. We will also be adding a user settings page that will allow the user to manually change the brightness as well.

I personally cannot get trought this battery fast enough to ever have the need to change the battery. It can last several hours.

But if anything, you could also just straight out buy a powerbank able to deliver something like 20W and just have that in your carry bag.

I thought battery was meant to be changed easily ? Or did I misread something? Maybe it would need to respect the current capacity and voltage but I cannot imagine why swapping for higher capacity if available in the same format would be of any issue.

I’m not looking to replace the battery now, but rather in a few years when the battery starts to decline.

When that happens, I’m curious to know whether the unit is capable of housing compatible larger-capacity batteries.

I did read that the battery is meant to be user-replaceable.

Glad to hear about the ALS!

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Replacing the battery is not issue necessarily. We just don’t recommend it because anytime you open up a unit there is always the potential of breaking something. Also, any time you replace the battery with a different capacity the fuel gouge will take time to learn the parameters. So it will need to be charged fully and then fully depleted. The battery compartment doesn’t have a lot of extra room for a larger battery.