I’ve got a Vim3 which I’m planning on fitting into an old laptop shell to DIY a small laptop. I’ve got everything else sorted (screen, keyboard, etc.) but I’m a bit stumped on the best way to power the thing with a battery. I’ve tried to search for various SMC battery powering solutions. The PiJuice seems like it would be a good fit, but it’s quite expensive, and obviously the Vim3 isn’t officially supported. I also thought about simply getting a powerbank with pass-through charging and strip it down, but then I would have to add in a separate circuit/chip to measure the battery voltage. So I was wondering, does anyone else have a good solution for powering the Vim3 from batteries while allowing it to also plug in and charge, similar to how a laptop or phone works?
Hi PMunch,
Vim3 doesn’t support voltage input from the GPIO pins so the pi juice is out of the question,
look into the topic Powering the VIM3
as mentioned, you can provide power via the VIN port
however you can’t charge your batteries from it, hence you will need to provide your own battery charging and voltage management circuitry 
Aah, that’s good to know. Because of space constrictions I would’ve had to mount the PiJuice next to the Vim3 instead of on top of it, so I’d have to run cables anyways and could easily hook it up to the Vim3 VIN port. But as I said it’s very expensive.
I’m almost back at just trying to find a power-bank with pass-through charging and then replace the cells and throw in a fuel-gauge in series with the cells to get battery percentage back to the device.
I’m surprised by how few offerings there are for this on the DIY market considering how battery banks with pass-through aren’t super rare.
Realize you have a VIM3 however the Edge-V has a Juice board.
A couple of days ago ordered that and an EDGE-V board for testing. From the specs it seems like a winning combination. That would be nice if they made something like that for the VIM3.
VIM3’s A311D has an internal pmic, it wasn’t made to accept battery input like RK3399 which was designed as a tablet soc