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I was sent one of these by Shawn at UUGear for review so here goes…<\/em><\/p>\n Witty Pi is a real-time clock and power management HAT for the Raspberry Pi B+, A+ and Pi 2. It has the following features:<\/p>\n You can configure whether or not the Pi will automatically switch on when you plug power into the Witty Pi by changing the red jumper. You can configure\u00a0a GPIO pin to control the LED by moving the yellow jumper and connecting up a GPIO pin to the spare jumper pin. You can configure which GPIO pin reads the button press by moving the green jumper and connecting up a GPIO pin to the spare jumper pin.<\/p>\n The Witty Pi fits snugly as a HAT on top of the Pi’s GPIO pins. The board provides extended GPIO pins so you don’t lose any GPIO functionality by using the board, which is good. The instruction manual, which you can download, includes instructions on how to download an\u00a0installation script. The script initiates the downloading of the entire Github repository<\/a>. This repository includes a script which syncs the time of the Pi to the real-time clock on the Witty Pi and also provides functions to set-up the scheduler to automatically shutdown the Pi and to\u00a0re-activate it. This is extremely useful, for example, for when you\u00a0only need the Pi up-and-running between specific times. It will take some digging into the scripts to find out how this is done to suit your own purposes.<\/p>\n I tested all the functions out. First of all, I booted up (by pressing the on\/off switch) with an ethernet cable plugged into the Pi and wrote\u00a0the time of the Pi to the real-time clock chip on the Witty Pi. Then, I disconnected the ethernet cable and rebooted.\u00a0On reboot, the Witty Pi’s daemon script automatically ran and read the time from the\u00a0Witty Pi and set the date\/time on the Pi correctly. I then tried the utility to set scheduled shutdown and restart times. This worked a treat.<\/p>\n The on\/off button sends a signal on GPIO 4 which the daemon script picks up on and sends a shutdown command to the Pi. This is especially handy if you’re running headless as it provides a much safer shutdown for the Pi rather than just pulling the power cable out. Needless to say, I tested this out a few times.<\/p>\n You can see all the in-built functions run in the demo below. It’s a bit long-winded, but if you want to see it all in action, this is your best bet.<\/p>\nInformation<\/h2>\n
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Review<\/h2>\n