Going through my previous blog entries I realized I had not provided the followup information for my Farm Operations Center Box that I had previously said I would.
So here it is! :-)
As I had mentioned before the medium sized box worked perfectly as a container for the 7 inch touchscreen with Pi3 attached.
As you can see here, the 4 squares line up perfectly with the metal frame of the touchscreen. Making for an easy mounting of the F.O.C. to the plastic container.
Here we have the view of Camera 2 moved over to monitor the Duck Domain. With an easy swipe of a finger up or down I can look at any of the camera feeds!
From my top picture above you can see there is a good amount of space available to mount additional items including but not limited to batteries. I had came across a very interesting sounding battery option with pass through capabilities advertised at Best Buy that I wanted to try. Of course when I arrived there to purchase it there was none to be found. Online it listed 3 in inventory, even the stores internal inventory listed 1, but after an hour of waiting and searching through Best Buy I ended up heading over to Walmart again to pick up a small usb battery.
Sadly the idea of pass through charging only seems of interest to those with cell phones. Trying to explain to various techs what exactly I needed in a battery led to a lot of confused looks and nothing that helped me for this project.
You would think the idea of having a power source that can charge your phone/tablet/micro usb item while also charging the battery would be a great thing to have. Why bring a charger and a battery if you battery can also charge your device while charging itself? Obviously a pass through battery would be quite nice to add into the F.O.C. box so I could just quickly pull the cord and head out to check things without having to power down and restart with the battery.
I did end up picking up a basic 4400 mah battery with the idea of testing, but while I was assured it had a 2.1 amp output the RPi3 with 7 inch screen was not impressed with its actual power providing and refused to work with just that battery. So caveat to others, keep your receipts and packaging.
Once I do find a pass through battery that works for my setup I will share out to Element 14.
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