Bought the Picar-X kit with battery and charger, There is a battery in the package but no charger.
The battery connector is not something that can be plugged anywhere except the Robot HAT board (or is it the servo board?). There is no documentation anywhere where it says this board will also charge the battery (that would be a real stretch).
How is the battery supposed to be charged ? A charger has already been paid for but nothing came in the package.
Response time on the support email is at least 24 hours.
Not a great experience (including receiving the package after 17 days).
Our picar-x kit includes a battery and Type-C charging cable, not a charging head.
You need to bring your own charging head, we recommend 5V 3A charging head, or your usual cell phone charging head is also possible.
How to charge the battery?
It’s quite simple. You connect the external Type-C power supply to the Type-C port of robot hat, it will charge the battery immediately and the red indicator light will be on.
When the battery is fully charged, the red light will turn off automatically.
Tip: It is recommended that you turn the picar-x off while charging.
In addition, we apologize for giving you a bad service experience, and we will further improve our service system.
Thanks for the reply. I was wondering if this was the case BUT the main tutorial makes no mention of it. Only by going in to Robot HAT tutorial (which it seems was updated or added recently) this valuable information is available.
I have managed to charge the battery thanks to these instructions!
Yes, we will add this guideline to the online documentation as soon as possible, thank you for your feedback.
Having just purchased a Picar-x I am wondering if I shut off the Picar-x, and while charging the battery, power-up the Raspberry Pi using an external power supply, to download software and program while the Picar-x is charging.
If your power supply is connected to the robot hat’s Type-C connector to charge the battery and turn off the robot hat’s output, the Raspberry Pi will not be powered. You will need an additional power supply to power the Raspberry Pi separately to realize your code programming work.
Connecting an external supply to the Picar-x causes the LED next to the charging port to flash, and the battery is not charging.
The charging led is blinking, it means no battery is detected, you can try to re-plug the battery to try. You can use a multimeter to measure the pins on both ends of the battery connector, the normal range is around 5v~8.4v.