GeeekPi UPS V5 Power Supply Uninterruptible UPS HAT for Raspberry Pi, Support 18650 Battery Charger Power Bank Power Management Expansion Board 5V for Raspberry Pi 4B/3B+/3B/2B/B+/B/A+/A

Charge/Discharge like a laptop battery - When external power plugged in, it supplies power to Pi and UPS. When no power, battery is used. Voltage of battery (for remaining battery level) and C/microUSB ports (for checking if charging/discharging) can be read from Pi through I2C. It also has a register value to power on Pi automatically when external power is connected, so basically Pi with this UPS can deal with blackout. (When blackout and no external power, shutdown Pi and UPS automatically if low battery. Then when power restored, Pi is powered on automatically) The one thing to be improved is that its automatic UPS shutdown count does not work as expected when charging (even in latest firmware). Setting shutdown count value of UPS to integer n should make UPS power off after n secs. But if charging, it takes not n secs but much longer (about 5~30 times) to be powered off. Well, even though it takes much longer, anyway it power off in minutes so this may not be a critical problem. There are more register values that can be read from UPS (details on EP-0136 page in 52pi wiki), but values above may be enough for normal use.

This product works great for a raspberry pi backpack for portability, but the built in chargers don’t provide enough power to charge anything other than a small lithium battery. This product works great so far and has had no issues so far. Only issue I have with it is the power indicator is only on the backpack and you can’t see the percentage on the pi, which doesn’t matter if you just use it as a backup. Would recommend.

Make sure to insert some batteries and charge it first, and check voltage output. Then test on the cheapest compatible pi you have before putting it to use. I already cooked a pi 4B with 8gb ram. THEN I checked the pins to discover they are putting out 8.6v

Only used it for a few days but it did appear to work ok, seemed to use about 800 mA or about 4 watts when running on batteries (in addition to the Pi's draw, idle 4B 2GB was drawing about 3.5 watts so the total draw on the batteries was about 7 watts). The main deal breaker for me is that it will charge and hold the batteries at about 100% SoC (4.2-4.3 volts) when plugged in (UPS mode). Maintaining Li-ion batteries at full charge 24/7 will greatly increase degredation. If you've ever used a laptop that's always plugged into AC you've probably noticed that the battery will loose something like 15 or more % per year and basically be completely unable to hold a charge after 3 or 4. I did try setting the I2C registers (there's one for full voltage address 13-14) but that did not change the charging behavior. It seems that even though the address is advertised as read/write, it's really just a read of the highest voltage seen. I can confirm that the low voltage, "protection voltage", register works. So the user can set the minimum voltage/SoC to disconnect the battery but not the max for charging. Overall, the UPS board was so close to being what I wanted but that oversight ruined it for me.

Works great

As expected

this crap has seen untold revisions and they still cant get this crap working properly. drains and kills batteries takes like an extra amp from the module JUST TO USE IT. pointless and dumb. i want my money back. already swaped out v43 w v47 or whatever it is. geek idoits more like

There is a handy link included in product documentation about performing a firmware update. As of 01/28/2023, it is version 14. It seems I ran into an issue where the system was stuck on shutdown after 120 seconds. Used this to stop the shutdown cycle. bus.write_byte_data(DEVICE_ADDR, 26,0) I think the upsplus/Full-featured-demo-code.py code might of done it. Be careful and read before running the scripts. The scripts are heavily commented and very helpful if you want to create your own to pull stats. This is how I can pull version it is running, example in the code via github repo. There also appears to be an issue with battery compatibility outside the basic requirement for a 18650 battery. No, a protected top 18650 battery will not work as it is too big. Best to go with flat top. There is somewhat active discussions on battery compatibility on the github page. Probably only activity so far this year. Seems you can run into issue with battery and even with chargers that result in stats not incrementing. Have spare chargers and tune into the github discussion on batteries; Charging don't stop #87