Maximise the Battery Life on your Raspberry Pi

[box type=”alert”]For all new designs, consider using the Sleepy Pi 2.[/box]

Why do you need Power Management?

Imagine, you’ve just created your first Raspberry Pi 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??

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 wake only 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 down or waste some more mains electricity?

It’s Also An Arduino…and an IO Board too!

Heard about the Arduino ? It’s a natty little microcontroller that’s 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 a Raspberry Pi AND an Arduino in the same box, you’ve got some serious power at your fingertips.

What about some more I/O? The Sleepy Pi adds even more I/O and adds Analogue Inputs and PWM Outputs that the Raspberry Pi doesn’t have. Now you can measure real-world signals and sensors, control servos…

…And a Real-Time Clock!

Keep track of time even when you are off-line. Want to power up the Raspberry Pi at a certain time 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.

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 “blankets”….

Screw Terminals make wiring up real-world signals to the Raspberry Pi‘s fiddly GPIO a breeze for even the most ham-fisted.

Typical Applications:

• Off-grid Remote Cameras
• Time-lapse photography
• Datalogging
• Wildlife Monitoring & Surveys
• Hardware Watchdog Monitor for Software Hangs
• Anything where the RPi doesn’t need to be always on!

Key Features:

• Daughter board for RPi A or B – Plugs into the RPi GPIO  – “Stacking” header for Expansion
• 5.5 – 17V – Power / Battery input
• Arduino – ATMEGA328P
• On / Off  – Power control to Raspberry Pi
• RTC – Battery backed Real-time clock with Alarms
• Wake-up on Demand – multiple sources i.e input change, timed
• GPIO Breakout – Raspberry Pi & Arduino GPIO, Analogue, PWM headers
• Prototyping Area – with screw terminals easy access