please choosego to mobile | Continue to access the PC version
View: 9535|Reply: 14

The RedReactor Battery Power Supply

[Copy link]

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
Published in 2021-7-16 17:50:27 | Show all floors |Read mode
I have developed a robust, powerful and feature rich battery power supply board for the Raspberry Pi which I believe will work equally well with the Orange Pi family of boards, therefore I hope you don't mind if I provide some information about it.

We are in the pre-launch phase for our Kickstarter campaign at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pascal-h/the-red-reactor-when-power-really-matters . We designed this board as part of creating a portable internet radio and found that existing boards did not provide all the features we needed, or could not reliably supply enough current and steady voltage for the whole system when dealing with peaky demands from the Pi, display, amplifier etc.

Whilst a simple power bank might seem like the obvious solution, they typically fail to either deliver enough power (so you have undervoltage issues causing crashes), can't provide power whilst being charged (or if they do, causing the battery charging to be permanently on thus reducing battery life), don't give you access to battery voltage for a safe shutdown, don't have adequate voltage regulation (which will cause crashes when heavily loaded - as they're designed for charging batteries, not match peaky power demands), won't restart unless the load is removed first, and don't have a way of connecting your own external power button nor read the charging status in software.

The Red Reactor board delivers a very stable 5.1v, with an I2C interface for battery voltage and current for safe shutdown on low battery or when you detect that the external supply has failed (uses 3v3 from the Pi for this), and drives a GPIO to provide the ON button state information with a separate open drain pull down interface for a long-press RESET function. So although the pin assignments are different between the Raspberry and Orange Pi, we will be providing a version of the board where you can easily wire these connections, and use your own ON button which can also be used for other functions in your software (short press, long press etc) and/or drive it from an external RTC alarm to power everything up (example video at https://youtu.be/NvDd5q-TUnc ).

The circuit design ensures that the 18650 batteries are not under load whilst being charged, allowing the charging cycle to complete accurately, whilst the board only consumes 10uA when off (compared to some designs with CPU's that consume many mA's monitoring the ON button!), ensuring maximum battery life. But at the same time, our extreme testing shows a super steady 5.1v output when delivering over 4 Amps, where we used 1 board driving a Pi4, display, USB hub with keyboard, mouse, webcam, and at the same time it was charging the battery of another board connected to a Pi3, also with a display and both running a heavy graphics test case.

If you would like more information and register to be notified when the campaign goes live, please check out https://www.theredreactor.com for details, including pictures and a video of the extreme testing. We'd love to get your support to achieve our goal and also benefit the Orange Pi community! Of course, feel free to ask questions too. Thank you!

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2021-7-27 16:45:09 | Show all floors
There are some use cases where the system is remote or up-time is critical, yet consume too much power to run for long periods on batteries. So whilst a high performance battery back-up power supply is essential to ensure an orderly shutdown when there is an external power outage, you may also want to restart everything as soon as the external power is restored.

Whilst the Red Reactor can easily support your Orange Pi with accessories and cleanly switch to battery power, you can also use the Vin port and ON button interface to easily integrate additional functionality into your project. In a previous video we showed how to add an RTC alarm to manage timed power-on and power-off requirements.

We've now created a new short video at https://youtu.be/Ob2czPwil8o on how to add a simple circuit to detect when external power is restored, which connects to the Vin port and operates alongside an ON button to create a trigger (even if you're using USB as the power input). A simple script will detect a power outage over I2C and perform a safe shutdown, whilst the system is automatically rebooted when external power returns!

Thank you for watching!

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2021-8-11 16:24:52 | Show all floors
Just wanted to give you a quick update on our progress. We were expecting our Kickstarter campaign https://www.kickstarter.com/proj ... ower-really-matters to go live this week but unfortunately the world's shortage of ICs (as you've no doubt read about in the news) has affected one of the components on our board. We obviously don't want to present a delivery schedule that we cannot commit to, so we'll look at alternative suppliers and solutions first.

We'd be happy to hear if you know of suppliers' stock for this particular component (INA219AIDCNR/INA219AIDCNT) or had good results with comparable, alternative parts. We'll let you know how we get on!

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2021-11-20 18:13:22 | Show all floors
These days, everything is controlled by software. In fact, even my DVD player's ON/OFF button is no longer hard wired into the power supply, and needs its software to decide that I really wanted to turn the thing off. Well, many a time that software gets completely stuck, refuses to obey my command, and the only option is to pull the power plug at the back. Not a pretty sight with all the dust and cobwebs, I can tell you!

Now imagine this happening with your Orange Pi project, but when the mains is backed up by battery power you can no longer just 'pull the plug'. And when your Pi is inside a nice case design, getting those batteries out is not going to be a quick and easy task.

That is why the Red Reactor has a nifty Hard Reset function built into the ON button interface, so all you have to do is wire the RUN port of the Red Reactor to the AP-RESET signal on your board. You can see the relevant Orange Pi pictures on here (https://forum.armbian.com/topic/ ... one-hardware-reset/), where AP-RESET is driven by the collector pin3 of Q9 into the C65 capacitor. The RUN signal from the Red Reactor is open drain, so will not affect normal operation, but pulls it to Ground after pressing the ON button 10 seconds until you let go, restarting the board.

So now, a long press of that ON button sorts it all out for you, and no need to pull the plug on that pesky software!

This short video ( https://youtu.be/_gN_dDZBG0A ) shows you how the ON button and RESET functions are integrated together for all your projects, and I hope you'll find it useful! Please continue to register your interest at https://www.theredreactor.com , thank you!

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2022-1-27 03:05:29 | Show all floors
We’re pleased to announce the first release of our Red Reactor Battery Widget, so you can see the battery status right from your desktop screen! Perfect for when you use the Red Reactor to make your Pi project portable, or you just want to make sure all is well in case you loose mains power.

The battery icon will show you the percentage charge, and during charging and discharging you can also see the battery current and voltage in the tool-tip when you hover over the icon, as well as the estimated time to full charge or how long you can keep going till you run out of juice!

The code is designed for use with the Red Reactor battery power supply, and is available from our Github repository (https://github.com/Scally-H/pi-battery-widget). For more information about the battery charging and discharge profiling results head over to our blog at https://www.theredreactor.com/20 ... -pi-battery-widget/

Feel free to post comments there or here, we'd love to hear from you, especially to help support the Orange Pi designs.

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2022-2-13 19:42:59 | Show all floors
We have just updated our Github code for the Red Reactor Pi Battery Widget with some new features – a pop-up warning when down to 10% capacity and a 30 second timer to automatic shutdown after the battery empty warning. Just follow the install or update instructions to keep all your data safe!

0

threads

6

posts

44

credits

Novice

Rank: 1

credits
44
Published in 2022-2-21 22:10:01 | Show all floors
The Red Reactor board delivers a very stable 5.1v, with an I2C interface for battery voltage and current for safe shutdown on low battery or when you detect that the external supply has failed (uses 3v3 from the Pi for this), and drives a GPIO to provide the ON button state information with a separate open drain pull down interface for a long-press RESET function. Nutanix NCSE-Core Exam Questions

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2022-3-9 03:34:29 | Show all floors
The Power of Standby

If you are thinking of creating a battery powered Pi project, like remote monitoring with sensors, you might find our new article measuring standby performance useful. If you want to save power by turning your device OFF between readings, battery drain in the power supply itself can have a real impact on total days of battery life.

We created a simple moisture monitoring example and measured the battery voltage each time the Pi was powered up by an RTC alarm, and whereas a competitor battery power supply barely managed to run for 2 weeks, the Red Reactor showed that it would keep working for months. That could save you a lot of hassle with sensors in hard to reach places!

The article and measurement results can be found on our News page at  https://www.theredreactor.com/2022/03/05/the-power-of-standby/.

Let us know what you think!

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2022-4-7 20:40:15 | Show all floors
Thank you for continuing to track our progress (and for reading this far down this thread!). The world chip supply shortage is still causing a problem for us, but we are hopeful that we can launch soon as things are slowly improving.

In the meantime, we have developed a Flask based web application that will enable you to monitor your battery status and usage remotely via a web browser, configure the monitoring process and even perform a remote reboot or shutdown. Perfect for when your Pi is used remotely or running without a display!



For more details please head over to our news update on https://www.theredreactor.com/2022/04/06/remotemonitoring/, and you can download the code with install instructions from our GitHub page at https://github.com/Scally-H/RedReactor

1

threads

15

posts

205

credits

Intermediate member

Rank: 3Rank: 3

credits
205
 Author| Published in 2022-5-3 04:59:07 | Show all floors
It is disappointing to see people like Mr Scott post such utter rubbish that is completely irrelevant to the topic of this thread, and that I am unable to get his message removed from this forum. I do wish Mr Scott could find something useful to do and maybe contribute something actually worthwhile to humanity, instead of writing such pointless drivel.

To the moderators of this forum, please, please, take action.

To those using Orange Pi boards, we look forward to your constructive comments or any questions you may have! Thank you for your support!
You need to log in before you can reply login | Register

Points Rule

Quick reply Top Return list