Is there a convenient way to use a large 2s LiPo battery (such as this one) as a power source for a microcontroller and LED strip? Specifically I'm looking for the ability to seamlessly switch between battery power and plugged in. I estimate that my LED strips will pull about 4.3 amps at 5 volts and I want it to be able to run for an hour. Most microcontroller DIY devices I've seen don't deal with that kind of battery requirements
A little background.
I'm making a glowy light cube thing (some infinity mirrors etc). I calculate I need a battery with more than 22 Watt Hours of power, which is not your everyday adafruit LiPo battery.
Additionally I want it to be a bit of an oblong shape (a triangular bipyramid to be exact) and so most 3.7V lipo batteries are too wide to fit inside. Found the above linked unit, but they're designed for use in airsoft guns and I haven't found any circuits designed specifically to use them as an uninterruptable power supply unit for 5V electronics. I'm also not sure what pitfalls exist for anyone naively trying to use a standard 2s lipo charger, buck/boost converters, and diodes to implement such a function.
If I can find a powerful enough 2s charger (one capable of producing 30 watts or more) could I just attach that to the battery and my electronics, thus allowing either the charger or the battery to run things?
If not, what kind of hoops do I have to jump through to have a separate environment for charging the battery while still allowing seamless crossover back to battery discharge?
Am I missing a third option that makes this problem trivial?
Update 11/17/2023
Been looking at the problem some more; the charger/diodes/converters route looks promising. Here's a description of the overall design with some device links:
Provide about 15 amps of 5.2V power to the device, use a step-up converter with current limiter and a 2s lipo BMS system to charge and protect the battery, feed the battery output through a step-down converter to produce 5.0V power, feed that output through a high-power schottkey diode to the electronics. The shore power runs straight through a schottkey diode to the electronics.
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
Remaining questions
Because the battery input and output are actually the same connectors, this inherently puts a step-up converter in series with a step-down converter. Since the shore power has a slightly higher voltage than the step-down converter there should be little to no current running through it when shore power is connected. Is that sufficient to prevent the step-down converter from messing with the charge process?
Some step-down converters with current limiting function use some kind of switching device on the output ground to sense/limit current. Is that also true of this kind of step-up converter? If so, do I need to switch to a usb style lipo charger and accept the fact that the battery will discharge much faster than it recharges?
