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Wearable Raspberry Pi Part 2 – Power Supply

All Fitted
All Fitted

Progress is finally starting on the power supply unit for the Pi, fitted into the same case style as the Pi itself, this is an 8Ah Li-Poly battery pack with built in voltage regulation.

Regulator Boards
Regulator Boards

Here are the regulators, fixed to the top of the enclosure. These provide the 12v & 5v power rails for the Pi unit, at a max 3A per rail.

Battery Pack
Battery Pack

In the main body of the case the battery pack is fitted. This is made up of 4 3-cell Li-Poly RC battery packs, rated at 2Ah each. All wired in parallel this will provide a total of 8Ah at 12.6v when fully charged.

Powered Up
Powered Up

Here the regulators are powered up from a 13v supply for testing. I have discovered at full load these modules have very bad ripple, so I will be adding extra smoothing capacitors to the power rails to compensate for this.

I/O
I/O

Here are the connectors on the top of the unit, outputting the two power rails to the Pi & the DC barrel jack that will be used to charge the pack.