Portable Pi Power Pack Makes For Petite Projects

Since the Pi Zero was released, there have been many attempts to add a power bank. Cell phone batteries are about the same size as a Pi Zero, after all, and adding a USB charging port and soldering a few wires to a Pi is easy. The PiSugar is perhaps the cutest battery pack we’ve seen for the Pi Zero, and it comes in a variety of Hats compatible with the Pi, capable of becoming a small display, a keyboard, or any other thing where a small, portable Linux machine is useful.

The core of this build is a small circuit board the size of a Pi Zero. Attached to this board is a 900mAh battery, and the entire assembly is attached to the Pi Zero with a set of two spring clips that match up with with a pair of pads on the back of the Pi. Screw both of these boards together, and you have a perfect, cableless solution to adding power to a Pi Zero.

But the PiSugar doesn’t stop there. There are also cases, for a 1.3 inch LCD top, a 2.13 inch ePaper display, an OLED display, a camera, a 4G module, and something that just presents the pins from the Pi GPIO header. This is an entire platform, and if you print these parts in white plastic, they look like tiny little sugar cubes filled to the brim with electronics and Linux goodness.

Yes, you’ve seen 3D printed Pi cases before, but nothing in the way of an entire platform that gives you a Pi Zero in an extensible platform that can fit in your pocket and looks like sweet, sweet cubes of sucrose.

24 thoughts on “Portable Pi Power Pack Makes For Petite Projects

  1. Petite project is grammatically wrong. Should be petit project since project (projet) is a masculin nom in french. Still, this is quite impressive form factor.

    1. Thanks for the information.
      Apparently “petite” has immigrated to here in America, but her brother, “petit” has not.
      Petite is often used to describe a particular size of women’s clothing, but also means “small”.

    2. No, in English “petite” is correct. It’s already a stupid and confusing enough language without gendered nouns. Don’t go confusing it even more by mixing grammar from French. There’s already enough Chiac in the world.

      1. well, yes, the information provided in this post is not new, the project was already in this state in July 2018 and since then there is no more info about the board or its availability

  2. Hackaday prize entry…
    “These are Concept, Design, Production, Benchmark, and Communication.”

    I guess this is for the “Concept” portion? Because, along with other comment/complaints, I don’t see much “Communication”, in regard to the project.
    Does the battery have its own charging microprocessor? Is it recharged through the Pi power jack? Where can we get the battery? What are its charging characteristics? Where are the gerbers for the Hat? How did they get the white printing on the battery shrink wrap?
    Will any/all of that be in the “Design” portion of the Contest?

    1. That really depends on the application.

      One of my Pi Zero’s runs CPU intensive tasks, has a 3.5″ LCD attached both are powered by a 4000mAh.
      I get approx 4 hours hours on the battery alone. So that would tell me it’d get just under an hour from this PISugar device.

      Lower power intensive projects are going to get significantly more run-time then I would.

  3. Makes for? How about:

    Portable Pi Power Pack Powers Petite Projects

    If you want to avoid using ‘power’ twice, you could use:

    Portable Pi Power Pack Promotes Petite Projects

    Although, the latter requires the product be readily available.

  4. 1. normal swich on/off
    2. setup on/off after no power (power break)
    3. input from solar panel / other lipo/ other 12V
    4. 7 diode and binary information how many minuts raspberry pi can working (or binary percent accumulator) no one diode, color etc.
    I need normal 57% or 372 minuts. I hate information (meybe 2h or 2min)

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