If you treat your Pi as a wearable or a tablet, you will already have a battery. If you treat your Pi as a desktop you will already have a plug-in power supply, but how about if you live where mains power is unreliable? Like [jwhart1], you may consider building an uninterruptible power supply into a USB cable. UPSs became a staple of office workers when one-too-many IT headaches were traced back to power outages. The idea is that a battery will keep your computer running while the power gets its legs back. In the case of a commercial UPS, most generate an AC waveform which your computer’s power supply converts it back to DC, but if you can create the right DC voltage right to the board, you skip the inverting and converting steps.

Cheap batteries develop a memory if they’re drained often, but if you have enough space consider supercapacitors which can take that abuse. They have a lower energy density rating than lithium batteries, but that should not be an issue for short power losses. According to [jwhart1], this quick-and-dirty approach will power a full-sized Pi, keyboard, and mouse for over a minute. If power is restored, you get to keep on trucking. If your power doesn’t come back, you have time to save your work and shut down. Spending an afternoon on a power cable could save a weekend’s worth of work, not a bad time-gamble.

We see what a supercap UPS looks like, but what about one built into a lightbulb or a feature-rich programmable UPS?