Adafruit Witty Pi 4 Mini – RTC & Power Management for Raspberry Pi on Sale

Description

Witty Pi 4 Mini is an add-on board that adds real-time clock (RTC) and power management to your Raspberry Pi. It can define your Raspberry Pi’s ON/OFF sequence, and significantly reduce energy usage. Witty Pi 4 Mini is the fourth generation of Witty Pi and it has these hardware resources onboard:

• Factory calibrated and temperature compensated real-time clock with ±2ppm accuracy.
• Dedicated temperature sensor with 0.125 °C resolution.
• AVR 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) with 8 KB programmable flash.

It’s a small electronic board that can add real-time clock and power management to your Raspberry Pi. Witty Pi 4 Mini is a new member of the fourth generation of Witty Pi, and it has a bonnet/pHAT form factor.

Please note, our demo photo shows it with a “2×20 Riser Header” which is NOT included!

Witty Pi 4 Mini has a very similar design to Witty Pi 4, however, it doesn’t come with a DC/DC converter onboard, and it uses a supercapacitor for RTC timekeeping when no power supply is connected. Witty Pi 4 Mini has solder pads on the back, which allow you to solder a DC/DC converter (LDO or switching DC/DC converter) there

The real-time clock (RTC) on Witty Pi 4 Mini has been calibrated in the factory and Witty Pi 4 Mini’s firmware also makes temperature compensation for the crystal. This makes the RTC very accurate and the actual annual error is limited to ±2ppm. When your Raspberry Pi boots up, the time stored in the RTC will overwrite the system time. As a result, your Raspberry Pi knows the correct time even without accessing the Internet. You can schedule the startup and/or shutdown of your Raspberry Pi, and make it a time-controlled device. You can even define a schedule script to schedule complicated ON/OFF sequences for your Raspberry Pi.

After installing Witty Pi 4 Mini on your Raspberry Pi, you get some amazing new features:

• You can gracefully turn on/off Raspberry Pi with a single tap on the switch.
• After shutdown, Raspberry Pi and all its USB peripherals’ power are fully cut.
• Raspberry Pi knows the correct time, even without accessing the Internet.
• Raspberry Pi knows the temperature thanks to the sensor in the RTC chip.
• You can schedule the startup/shutdown of your Raspberry Pi.
• You can even write a script to define a complex ON/OFF sequence.
• Monitor external voltage and turn on/off your Raspberry Pi accordingly.

Witty Pi 4 Mini supports all Raspberry Pi models that have the 40-pin GPIO header, including A+, B+, 2B, Zero, Zero W, 3B, 3B+, 3A+, and 4 B.

Raspberry Pi communicates with the RTC chip (PCF85063A), temperature sensor, and microcontroller on Witty Pi 4 Mini via I2C protocol. The microcontroller has an adjustable I2C address: 0x08 which ‘shadows‘ the other I2C devices so you never have to worry about I2C address collisions.

There is a /WittyPi3/ version and a /WittyPi4/ version for download from the mfr. web page. You just need to run these two commands in your Raspberry Pi to install the software:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ wget http://www.uugear.com/repo/WittyPi4/install.sh

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo sh install. sh

ACCURATE REAL-TIME CLOCK AND ON/OFF SCHEDULING

Scheduling the ON/OFF sequence for Raspberry Pi is the most popular feature of Witty Pi, and it is extremely useful for systems that are powered by batteries. By only turning on Raspberry Pi when necessary, the battery can be used way much longer with Witty Pi installed.

TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED DEVICE

The temperature sensor on Witty Pi 4 Mini has a 0.125 °C resolution. The temperature data is used for compensating the crystal and making the RTC more accurate. You can also specific the action (startup or shutdown) when the temperature goes above or below the preset threshold. This means you can also make your Raspberry Pi a temperature-controlled device.

E-LATCHING POWER SWITCH

Witty Pi 4 Mini implements an e-Latching power switch, which is very similar to the power switch on

your PC/laptop computer. You can gracefully turn on/off your Raspberry Pi with a single tap on the

button. The software running in the background will execute the shutdown command before the power

gets cut, and it avoids the data corruption caused by a “hard” shutdown.

SINGLE I2C DEVICE

Witty Pi 4 uses MCU to emulate a single I2C device with default address 0x08, and also map all I2C registers in real-time clock and temperature sensor as virtual I2C registers in the same device. You can access all I2C registers in real-time clock and temperature sensors via the single I2C device emulated by Witty Pi 4.

The advantage of this new design is that Witty Pi 4 hides other I2C devices (real-time clock, temperature sensor) and becomes the proxy for them to talk to Raspberry Pi. Because the I2C address used by Witty Pi 4 can be changed to any value, you can always avoid the I2C address conflicting.

UWI SUPPORT

Witty Pi 4 Mini is fully supported by UWI (UUGear Web Interface), and you can access your Witty Pi 4 Mini from any device that has network access.

SOFTWARE INSTALLATION

Witty Pi 4 Mini uses the same software as Witty Pi 4. You just need to run these two commands in your Raspberry Pi to install Witty Pi 4 Mini’s software. The software and firmware of Witty Pi 4 Mini are open-sourced. You can find the source code on GitHub.