New power board for the Raspberry Pi on Kickstarter is perfect for an in-car situation

Good evening all.

I just thought I’d share with you this Kickstarter for a Raspberry Pi power board. Designed to go in a car, and to take a 12V input and a signal from the ignition, the board sports the following features:

  • 12V power input (reduced to 5V for the Pi)
  • Real Time Clock
  • Battery monitor
  • External trigger
  • Cooling fan
  • Sleep mode
  • Timed shut-off
  • Programmable via an ATtiny.

Here’s how the project creator, from Italy, describes it:

The Attiny85 senses ignition switch, car battery voltage and Raspberry Pi status (Powered On, Powered Off or Screensaver), then (based on a Python script on your Pi) determines to shut off the buck converter or keep it on.

The board design frees almost all the gpio pins as Attiny and RTC relies on i2c to communicate back and forth with Rasberry, Fan is on the same 5v bus as the Pi, so It’s ON whenever the Buck Converter is on.

For quiet operations and non stressing applications I choose a 12v fan working on 5v, for more demanding uses It’s best to use a 5volt one at full speed. It could also be tied on a GPIO pin to enable PWM control based on processor temp.

The Attiny85 senses ignition switch, car battery voltage and send data to the Pi, which, in turn sends its status (Powered On, Powered Off or Screensaver).

The Raspberry, based on a Python script on your Pi desktop determines to stay on, on screen saver or to shut down; in case of shut down sends a command to the Attiny to shut off the buck converter to minimize battery consumption. A battery voltage threshold can be used to trigger also a clean shutdown before battery goes flat.

The fully-assembled board on Earlybird is 25 Euros rising to 35 Euros after the first 100 have gone.

You can take a look at the Kickstarter, and pledge, here.

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