PiJuice - a brilliant portable power solution

I’ve been looking for a portable, battery powered, solution for my Raspberry Pi for a while now. There are some good offerings (and some less-so) on the market but none have really ticked all the boxes for me: compact, slimline, capable of automatically not frying the Pi when I also want to run from mains power, and with a passthrough GPIO connector (stackable with other goodies). Effectively I’m looking for something dinky that will fit on a Zumo Robot.

pijuice
Today, a great email appeared in my inbox from PiSupply describing PiJuice, a portable battery solution that ticks those boxes and more besides. It looks (to use my favourite word) AWESOME. The slimline design and HAT form factor is very in keeping with producing dinky robots. I’m liking what I see here.

Watching the video on Kickstarter I can see the team behind PiJuice really thought long and hard about how to produce the ideal battery for the Raspberry Pi. For example, at one reward level they offer a solar cell for charging in remote locations. This is a really tempting proposition for so many Raspberry Pi projects I read about in the developing world.

But, it doesn’t stop there. The Kickstarter page and video describes tutorials that they will be producing covering interesting things one can do with PiJuice, including a portable point and shoot camera which looks great.

The funding on this project appears to be going crazy: in the first day they have already exceeded their target by ~£2000 (and climbing - every time I refresh more have backed it). I’ve backed it straight away.

Kudos to the team behind PiJuice for producing what looks to be one of the most useful and interesting add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi.

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