Blog ≫ 2016 ≫ One of my raspberry pi's is off grid now
Nice, Clare bought me an adafruit powerboost1 for my birthday, with a battery, so I can use that to power a raspberry pi, but also charge the battery while the battery is powering the pi too, for uninterrupted usage. Hopefully you can see this picture below, it's not great but it's taken by the pi itself while being powered by the battery. The raspberry pi is wirelessly connected to the internets, and also being powered only by a battery. The lead connecting the camera module to the raspberry pi zero is not very long so it was difficult to hold it in place. Plus I burned the dinner while i was taking this...
Got an excess of cabling there it should be as neat as this2 but I've soldered a usb connector on there instead of just soldering short wires from the powerboost to the raspberry pi. I can optimise this later...
With this I can take the raspberry pi to the car, or anywhere. The car will be interesting, if the car battery can charge the little lipo battery while the car is running, and then shut the pi down gracefully when I turn the engine off it might be good to use this for car audio or in car camera or something. My parking is dreadful as I have only one wing mirror in the beetle, so it would be good to make a parking sensor or something.
I've been trying to figure out what I could do with these solenoids3 - if I can use them for locking the doors of the beetle then our old VW could be hackable like the new ones...
- Removed old learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-powerboost-500-plus-charger link here.
- Removed old blog.adafruit.com/2015/12/18/how-to-run-a-pi-zero-and-other-pis-from-a-lipo-including-low-battery-raspberry_pi-piday-raspberypi/ link here.
- Removed old coolcomponents.co.uk/solenoid-5v-small.html link here.
raspberry pi: Credit card sized super cheap computer, awesome.