Raspberry Pi Battery Power

Running a Raspberry Pi on batteries -- specifically a 12V lead acid battery and a USB power bank. Video includes expected battery life calculations and battery life tests and for a Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi Zero, and other Pi models.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation power consumption page is here:

If you enjoy this video, you may be interested in my recent Raspberry Pi project videos:

Raspberry Pi Weather Station:

Raspberry Pi Anemometer:

More videos on SBCs, computing and related topics can be found at:

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:52 Five Pis
02:41 USB power bank
05:34 Power bank tests
12:34 Lead Acid battery
19:37 Wrap

#RaspberryPi #Batteries #BatteryPower #ExplainingComputers

[qcpvetter]

These videos are like what Saturday morning cartoons use to be to me when I was a kid.

[RaviRJoshi]

Videos like this is what makes world a better place, and EC a popular channel. Prof.

[techntell]

As this experiment went on, you could hear his enthusiasm diminishing with each run 😄 It probably felt like the universe would come to an end before production was finished! Kudos and great video!

[aryantiwari]

This video was incredible. This must have taken a lot of effort!
Lead acid FTW!

[msulemanf]

Love it, solar next? Easily one of my top 10 channels - consistently delivering well produced, interesting, accurate, exhaustive & kind-spirited videos. Thank-you.

[kev]

Rumour has it that Chris is running a P Zero off a car battery .. he hopes to show us the results on his 85th birthday...

[An.Individual]

re table at 5:15 A power bank is rated at it's nominal voltage which is 3.7V for lithiums cells. So the energy in a 10, 000mAh battery is 37 watt hours (10A * 3.7V)
The current consumed by the Pi is rated at 5V.
runtime for Pi4 is (3.7 * 10 * 75%) / (5 * 0.6) = 9.25 hours

[Uniblab]

...forgot to mention...my Sunday mornings are not complete unless I view and digest your videos. Well done.

[xjet]

Perhaps the lead-acid results were skewed because without an intelligent voltage cut-off, the lead-acid battery would exhaust its entire capacity, well below the safe minimum. The power-bank is smart enough to disconnect the load when the battery is down to the safe minimum voltage but that simple buck converter will likely keep going down to almost 5V of input voltage.

[bananus]

We shouldnt forget Mr.Scissors. He helps to get all reviews

[duytdl]

Can always count on EC for no-nonsense to the point videos on these subjects. Well done sir!

[BryanBenoit]

I absolutely love every single video on this channel. Thanks a million !

[FuzzyElf]

From one Christopher to another: Thank you very much for sharing your knowledge and creativity -- and humor -- in your remarkable videos.

[spiders-tours]

Your next project would be interesting if a solar panel (which should be usable in a greenhouse) can charge the battery whilst it's in use. The application could work for a very long time indeed. Nice tests, thanks for the video.

[piconano]

When my daughter moved in her apartment, I garbed the small alarm controller the previous owner left behind.
It had a battery like yours making 3/4 of the enclosure, and it was only 2 years old.
It now provides power to my RPi2B+ Rpi Noir camera, running RPi-Cam-Web-Interface on Raspbian, making the best IP security camera in the world for $50 !!
I connected a beefier 5V @5A buck converter than what you show in your video to power the setup 24/7. That's all I had.
Fortunate for me, the internal 12V SLA charger circuitry can supply 1A to charge the battery (~12W). Running a Rpi is a walk in the park for the built-in charger.
When I lose power the charger will stop, but the 12V battery is fully charged and ready to go.
I never tested how long it would take for the system to run down.
Now I've got a pretty good idea. Thanks to your video.

[sandeepkulkarni]

Due to low space constraints and Higher Power Requirements of Raspi 4 (1GB RAM) I had to design a converter for 3 Li-ION cells in series (3.7*3=11.1V) and then stepping down this voltage to 5V using a buck converter at nearly 2A!
Happy to see similar work Chris!!

[markdonnelly]

Your videos never disappoint, well done again. I nearly choked on my coffee with your reasoning for not testing all the devices though, hilarious!

[mikecarlson]

this is absolutely pure fun to see the experiment result, thanks a lot

[RaspberryPiGirls]

this video is so professional. I only tried 18650 batteries for my raspberry pi4.

[frankligas]

Thanks for the video. Design experience idea. Back in the mid 1990's I had a project where a laptop needed to run a weather station for one month. This was out in a remote farming location. I set up the laptop to run from two 12 volt marine deep cycle boat batteries. The batteries were connected with wires soldered onto the power connection ports of an APC brand battery backup unit designed to run the computer when the power failed. So by starting with a battery backup unit, that took almost all of the engineering out of the equation. APC battery backups run on a 12 volt, lead acid battery identical to the one you show in this video. The build was simple. Buy a battery backup unit. Open it up and remove the small 12 volt battery and solder longer wires that would connect to the two bigger boat or car batteries. Then take the battery backup apart and cut the alarm buzzer off of the circuit board. When the backup unit is not plugged into the wall, it runs on batteries. the annoying alarm is buzzing as a needless warning. Other than that, the only other thing to do was to put the whole thing in a waterproof box, and connect the ground wire to a grounding rod in the field. We ran these laptops for years this way. The trick of having two batteries was so that when we were swapping out the batteries on a monthly basis, we could keep one battery connected while swapping out the other. This allowed for the laptops to run without needing to be shut down. Later, around 1997 small 12 volt solar pannels started to show up in local auto parts stores. We bought one and connected that to the batteries as well. This allowed us to run the laptops off-grid for six months until the whole thing was blown to a million pieces by a direct strike of a lightning strike. : ) Also, to charge the spare batteries I was swapping out, I used a second modified battery back up as the battery charger to recharge the batteries. This just needed some longer wires with alligator clips soldered onto them.