How to eliminate numerous external ports in your projects for that professional look?

Many project these days require a lipo battery pack. Adafruit have some nice units like the powerboost 500C or 1000C. When pairing them with any arduino board which has a micro/mini/standard usb for uploading sketches, how does one wire up those nice powerboost units such that the micro usb on the powerboost boards are no longer required. i.e I want to upload sketches, download SD data, and charge all though one single micro usb port. is this possible? if so, how?

Anyone have any ideas if this is possible? or do I need to have three ports? 1 for charging, 1 for uploading sketches, and one for an SD card? The adafruit feather data logger is a nice unit but the SD card is on the opposite side of the board so if placed in housing, its impossible to access the other side!

Cheers,

Aaron

Hi Aaron,
Apart from finding a board which has the equivelant of a PowerBoost built into it, you could always plug your USB cable into your Arduino board, then tap the 5V lines off that to go to the 5V input of the power boost. But again, things are starting to get messy.

I think what Sam’s getting at is to get that professional look you need to start designing your own boards - a plug-through version of the power boost 1000C that passes power and data would be a neat, niche product for hobby electronics!
Otherwise you’re looking at hacking power and data back and forth between the power boost.

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