It turns out that my original plan to have the lithium ion batteries, that were SUPPOSED to be charged by solar, didn’t work out so well. I’m pretty sure it was because I didn’t have power-pathing in place (see Adreas Speiss video here) and this PDF. The solar cells were powering the weather station AND trying to charge the batteries at the same time. Batteries didn’t last long due to insufficient charging 🙁 So now I’m going back to the drawing board, to add a Schottky diode, a P-channel TrenchFET MOSFET, and a 10K resistor to the charger board. This seems to work well during my testing inside (after discombobulating the weather station and bringing it inside for that power supply modification and testing.
Now, scoping out the power supply section in KiCAD, I see that I switched the drain and the source connections of the MOSFET for the load-sharing mod. Apparently I didn’t look closely at the MOSFET connections. So now a new version of the PCB is in the works. Well, this is OK since I need to make a “hand-solder” modification to the ADS1115 A-D converter footprint, extending solder pads. I apparently created solder bridges between the pins on the chip. Well, there goes $5. Ouch! The device PDF says it is VSSOP chip outline, but I’m creating a hand-solder version of the TSSOP footprint. Same but easier to solder (I hope!)