I’ve just shared a new project: “safePower”
I like working with the Pi Zero W and Pi 4 as they are very compact, very powerful and very cheap for the capability they offer. I want to use them on small projects, stand-alone, and can’t always guarantee power. As we know most Pi’s don’t like suddenly being turned off. Microcontrollers are much more able to handle this environment.
I didn’t want a UPS, I just needed to buy enough time for the Pi Zero to shut down in an orderly manner, then importantly when power is restored to start up again and keep running.
I could not find a product in a reasonable price range to do this, especially if I wanted to automatically restart once power is restored. I also needed a challenge to help me learn about the Pico.
Along comes this new micro controller, the Pi Pico, very cheap, very powerful and importantly very easy to get up and running and has many features to boot. More importantly it has lots of resources, many of which are still available once this project has been implemented.
To give access to the unused resources on the Pi Pico I created a simple ASCII based serial interface.
Read more.
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Hey Tim,
Thanks for sharing your project! Quite an innovative solution to perform safe-shutdown in a power outage,
I’d imagine that this could also be quite useful if you’re running a Pi on a generator or off solar power. Also, huge props on the Fritzing diagram, it’s always nice to see such clean diagrams in project submissions!
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