Having trouble powering on Jetson TX2 board with external battery

Hello,

I’m currently trying to get our Jetson TX2 mobile for a school project. We are able to power on the solid red light by the CR5 on the board when the battery is connected but pressing the power button does not boot up the board and turn on any other lights.

I am currently using a Turnigy 1800mAh 3S 20C Lipo battery. I read online to use a capacitor in parallel close to the board so I have a 100mF 100V capacitor with the positive end of the capacitor solder to the positive part of the barrel connector and the negative end of the capacitor soldered to the negative part of the barrel connector.

My guess is that the battery does not have enough capacity to power on the board at start up but I want to confirm here since we our on a budget and don’t want to buy a new battery unless we know for sure.

Thank you for the help!

Bumping for visibility

There is a good chance the capacitor was the right idea, but too small. If you have it, then try something like 1000uF or larger as a test. If the power wiring is a lighter guage, then try a heavier guage wire. If any other components (besides the TX2) use that battery, then consider adding a quality buck/boost style regulator.

Thank you for the reply! We’ll give the capacitor a shot and we’ll look into heavier gauge wire. Just to clarify, you think a 1800mAh battery should be able to power on the Jetson board? Also I’m not sure if this makes a difference with power requirements but we are using the Jetson TX2 development kit board not the Jetson TX2 Module.

This could work. The power management controller must sequence power rails and clocks in a particular order during startup, and if the components are not stable, then it won’t power up. That very very short spike of current draw is very sensitive to not starting if the voltage drops during that spike. This is typically the issue (and is probably very similar regardless of which carrier board you use, although there could be some differences). The voltage must remain stable with a higher current spike for a very tiny fraction of time right as power is applied.

Okay thank you for the explanation, that all makes sense. We’ll give it a shot and report back if we get it working!

The wire gauge ended up being the issue! We were using 22 Gauge wire and upped it to 18 gauge and we got it working! Thank you for the help!