pizerosolar

Summary

Solar powered Raspberry Pi Zero setup, including an external battery voltage monitor and associated automation to handle clean shutdown and restart of the Raspberry Pi Zero.

Hardware Used

• Raspberry Pi Zero W

• Arduino Pro Mini 5V/16MHz

• TP4056 based 1S Lipo Battery Charger Module

  • ex: https://www.banggood.com/TP4056-1A-Lipo-Battery-Charging-Board-Charger-Module-Mini-USB-Interface-p-1027027.html

• 3V to 5V DC-to-DC boost converter module

  • ex: https://www.banggood.com/DC-DC-1V-5V-To-5V-500mA-Boost-Converter-Step-Up-Power-Module-p-1069696.html

• 5V/1A Solar Panel

  • Ex: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01GFGRGA4/ wired in parallel

• 3.7v Lipo 1S battery >= 8000mAh

  • Ex: http://www.ebay.com/itm/1-3-7V-8000-mAh-Polymer-Li-Lipo-Battery-GPS-PSP-PDA-ipod-DVD-Tablet-PC7565121-/282379380717

Schematic diagram

Software:

Lowpower-Battery-Monitor

Arduino Pro Micro code to handle battery management.

• Reports voltage to RaspberryPi via GPIO TTL Serial pins every 16 seconds
• Keeps track of "run" state to cleanly shut-down and reboot pi
• Toggles the onboard "RUN" pin of the rPi CPU to wake & boot rPi after shutdown

battmon.py

Battery voltage monitor and logger client for rPi

• Simple module to log incoming voltage reports from the Arduino module
• Handles shutdown message