I am working on an project where my Raspberry will probably go through many power outages so I need a good UPS to keep my Raspberry safe. What tipe of UPS can I use? Is it possible to configure Rachel in such a way that when the UPS runs out of battery it automatically shuts down the raspberry?
Thanks.
Oscar.
Hi Oscar. I am just about to hit the road traveling for a couple of days and will have limited Internet access, so I wanted to quickly put up a post on your question. I will look in more detail when I get back home later this week. Hopefully in the mean-time someone else can answer your question.
Sounds to me like you are having Brown-outs as well as full power outages. I just did a search for info on best UPS’s for brown-outs and got a discussion group about this topic. here it is: Which UPS for line conditioning and brownout protection?
Dave
Oscar,
As a follow-up, maybe I should have initially asked you what type of RACHEL device are you using? Raspberry pi? I have been checking and still unable to find a good way to automatically shutdown the RACHEL in the event of a power outage. However, I have come across several online posts that indicate that a moderate powered UPS can keep a Raspberry Pi device powered for several hours. Would this give you enough time to safely shutdown the Rachel Pi?
Dave
World Possible
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Oscar, we are now using RACHEL Plus units in Africa, but before we upgraded, we ran the Raspebery/RACHEL Pi version from large external cell-phone USB charging packs. A unit with 10-15,000mAh capacity will run the Pi all day, and many have built-in LCD display that shows the internal battery charge state or hours of use. And you can use the USB charger from the RACHEL Pi to charge the battery pack, and a short USB to mini cable between the battery pack even while it is in use so you can keep ithe Pi running continually. There are also plug in shield boards for Raspberry that handle safe power down on loss of power if you feel that is needed.
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Regarding the RACHEL-Plus…there is a battery watcher script that will safely shut down the CAPv1 or v2 when there is less than 3% remaining battery life. This script currently only runs on the RACHEL-Plus.
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In each of the schools we fit 2 x 320Watt solar panels and 2 x 220Ahr deep cycle batteries. This allows us to run the Pi and provide charging for laptops and lighting. to act as a ups we fit a phone power pack usually 15000 ma to the Pi. We use 12v to 5v converters for the Pi and 12v to 19v converters for the laptops.
So far (4 years) this has worked well. It is essential to keep the solar panels free of dust and not let the batteries drop below 50%
Hope this helps