- Overview
- Technical Details
Maximise the Battery Life on Your Raspberry Pi
Why do you need Power Management?
Imagine, you’ve just created your firstย Raspberry Piย project and you’re really proud of yourself. You pat yourself on the back, box it up, plug in the batteries and send your baby out into the Big Wide World. Success! Hurrah!
However…..6 hours later your marvellous creation has stopped working, worse still the SD card with all your code on, that took days to debug, has corrupted.
No problem, you’ll buy new batteries and restore the SD from backup……. You DO have a backup, right??
Battery Hungry
The Raspberry Pi is a fantastically powerful, small and cute computer. Ideal for portable, battery powered applications.ย But it’s not designed for battery power!ย For example, the Raspberry Pi Model 3B does not have a direct battery input and consumes aroundย 500mA of current during normal operation. Put another way, if you provide it with a regulator to use batteries, typical AA battery packs will only give youย aย couple of hours use (see theย Raspberry Pi Battery Life Calculator).
The Raspberry Pi has NOย LOWย POWER MODE!
Many applicationsย do not need the Pi to be powered at all timesย and could benefit from emulating the typical low power strategies common in modern microcontroller systems.
How It Works
Do you know how most modern devices save power? They switch to a low power “sleep” mode whenever they’re not being used and wakeย onlyย when they next need to do something. The Sleepy Pi replicates this type of behaviour on the RPi. It allows the RPi to shut itself down when it’s not being used to save power and wakes it up when it’s got work to do (get back to work!) either at timed intervals or when some real-world signal cries out for attention.
For example, you’ve got a long term Timelapse project in mind. You want to snap a picture every 10 minutes and store it. It takes about 10 secs to snap and store. What does the RPi do with the other 9mins and 50 seconds??? Run your batteries downย or waste some more mains electricity?
It’s also an Arduino…and an IO Board too!
Heard about theย Arduinoย ? Itโs a natty little microcontroller thatโs easy to program and learn hardware coding on. The Sleepy Pi packs an ATMega328P running at 8Mhz. Easily program this from the Raspberry Pi itself using the free tools – no extra equipment to get. With aย Raspberry Piย ANDย anย Arduinoย in the same box, you’veย got someย serious powerย at your fingertips.
What about some more I/O? The Sleepy Pi adds even moreย I/O and adds Analogue Inputs and PWM Outputs that the Raspberry Pi doesnโt have. Now you can measure real-world signals and sensors,ย control servosโฆ
…And a Real-Time Clock!
Keep track of time even when you are off-line. Want to power up the Raspberry Piย at aย certain timeย or take a timed measurement? No problem. The Sleepy Pi has a Real-time clock (RTC) than is backed up by a battery and can even sync the clock on the Raspberry Pi.
…And a Current Monitor!
The Sleepy Pi canย measureย how much current the Raspberry Pi draws. This can be used to optimise how much power the Raspberry Pi is actually using and optimise it.
Expandable
The sleepy Pi has a prototyping area and set of expansion headers so that you can easily plug in extra circuitry, like the forthcoming range of โblanketsโโฆ.
Typical Applications:
- Off-grid Remote Cameras
- Time-lapse photography
- Datalogging
- Wildlife Monitoring & Surveys
- Hardware Watchdog Monitor for Software Hangs
- IOT Sensors
- Anything where the RPiย doesn’tย need to be always on!
Key Features:
- Daughter board for RPi Zero / ZeroW, A+ or B+,Rpi 2 or Rpi3B/3B+ ->Plugs into the RPi GPIO
- 5.5 – 30V –ย Power / Battery input
- Arduinoย – ATMEGA328P
- On / Offย – Power control to Raspberry Pi
- RTCย – Battery backed Real-time clock with Alarms
- Wake-up on Demandย – multiple sources i.e input change, timed, etc
- GPIO Breakoutย – Raspberry Pi & Arduino GPIO, Analogue, PWM headers
- Current Monitorย – Measure the Raspberry Pi current consumption
- Plug-in Blanketsย ย – extend functionality
Sleepy Pi 2 USB-C Schematic
Setup script – updated for Buster and Rpi 4
See Documentation index for latest information
For the latest code and examples check out our Github repositories
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