Introducing The Sleepy PI Family: A Range Of Sleep Mode And Arduino I/O Boards For Raspberry Pi

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the Sleepy Pi family of boards and accessories for the Raspberry Pi.

Sleepy Pi Block Diagram

The first board in the family is the Sleepy Pi, which is essentially a Smart Power Management board for the Raspberry Pi that includes a low power Arduino that stays powered when the Raspberry Pi is off.

The Sleepy Pi can reduce the overall power used by the Raspberry Pi, particularly when powered from batteries in applications where the Raspberry Pi doesn’t need to be on all the time. You can think of it as adding a “Sleep” mode to the Raspberry Pi, because the Arduino can periodically power the Raspberry Pi down and then “Wake” it up to perform a task before putting it back to Sleep again. As a side benefit you also get some Arduino I/O to play with, like Analogue Inputs and PWM’s.

Key benefits include:

  • Reduce the effective Power consumption of the Raspberry Pi
  • Power directly from batteries up to 17V
  • Adds Arduino I/O to the Raspberry Pi such as Analogue In or PWM
  • Break out the Raspberry Pi GPIO & Arduino I/O to screw terminals
  • Prototyping area and expansion headers for daughter boards
  • Power button for manual switch on/off
  • Wake or Sleep in response to events or triggers such as:
    • Analogue value crosses a threshold
    • Digital input changes
    • Specific time to Wake via Real-time Clock

We’re looking to offer a number of the next batch of boards to the community for test and feedback. If you have a great idea for how you would use a Sleepy Pi and have some time to test one, then please contact us with your details and project using the form below.

Sleepy Pi Contact Form

2 thoughts on “Introducing The Sleepy PI Family: A Range Of Sleep Mode And Arduino I/O Boards For Raspberry Pi”

  1. Just let me get this straight, the RPi essentially shuts down and reboots every time the sleepy pi turns it on/off ?
    So it I want a timely response to some I/O event e.g. intrusion detection, this is not going to work. However for time-lapse e.g. photography then its OK.

    1. That’s it in a nutshell. You are bound by the time that it takes to boot the RPi. There are people taking steps to get this as low as possible with fast SD cards and cutting down the OS, but this is still slated to be in the region of 5-10s.
      So, yes if you want to snap a picture of an intruder this would probably be too long.
      Applications that are periodic, such as Datalogging and monitoring are ideal.

      Jon

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