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Thursday, September 29, 2016

pi_power - power management for portable Raspberry Pi projects

I have been working on a portable Raspberry Pi project for a while - still not there yet but I've completed one important piece.

It's portable so it obviously has a battery. The Pi takes quite a bit of power so it needed to be rechargeable and include a charger. Adafruit make a great device called the PowerBoost 1000C which takes care of the core charging and power supply functions. But I really wanted my project to work like my phone does:

  • To power it up from a cold state, press a button for a few seconds
  • To power it off, press the same button for a few seconds
  • Indicate how much power remains in the battery
  • Provide an alert when that is running really low
  • Shut down safely without any data corruption if the battery does run out
  • To recharge the battery, just plug in a cable from a USB charger

  • I couldn't find anything that provided all the functionality I wanted - so I built my own

    pi_power consists of fairly straightforward circuitry that links the PowerBoost to the Pi in conjunction with two python scripts that run in the background and monitor the battery voltage.

    If you are building a portable RasPi project then you might want to take a look


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