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  • Author Author: Problemchild
  • Date Created: Date Created
  • Views 2502 views
  • Likes 2 likes
  • Comments 11 comments
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Raspberry Pi LIPO battery Pack Endurance Test

Problemchild

It seems to be a regular question "how long will my Raspberry Pi last with battery XYZ?", obviously the answer is "it depends" but really what kind of answer is that.

To give an indicative answer I decided to try it for my self with a standard Raspberry Pi model B and a 10Ah LIPO Battery Pack from Seeedstudio

Nothing fancy here just the RPI in near idle state running a clock to allow the time lapse camera to keep track of the elapsed time.

 

 

The raspberry Pi was running at around 350ma which I thought was quite low but maybe the latest Rasbian 24/12/14 has some power management foo included, also the network  wasn't in use and this can be a bit of a power hog.

 

Any way the final result was very nearly 17 Hours which I think is quite impressive ...what do you think?

  • in reply to shabaz

    Yeah this is a nice battery pack I'm rather glad I didn't use the 20Ah pack now as I would be still waiting for the silly thing to discharge.

    Ho BTW adding a cat 5 cable bumped up the current by 30-40ma!!

  • Useful battery pack! That's more than half the capacity of the (massive) battery on my laptop.

    Thinking about getting one to charge the mobile phone on trips.

  • in reply to rew

    O yeah the  inevitable not 10AH @5V but 10AH @3.7ish!! Or Around 37Wh.

     

    Out of that I got approximately 0.35*17*5=29.75=30ish Wh out of it or about 80% of the theoretical charge in the battery which isn't too bad

  • John,

    The battery pack is rated at 10Ah at 3.7V. That would mean it should be able to provide 10/5*3.7 = 7.4Ah at 5V, assuming 100% conversion efficiency. With the pi running at 350mA you should in theory get 21 hours out of it. Hmmm. with "only" 17 hours, that would mean the 3.7 to 5V step up is about 80% efficient assuming the battery capacity of your battery pack is as advertized.

     

    I have a pack, advertised as double that of yours (20Ah) which I measured to have only 6700mAh. (which is still better on the $/Ah metric than yours because I got it cheap).

    I also measured a step-up converter yesterday. It was taking about 2.8A at 3.8V to output 1.7A at 5V. An efficiency on the order of 60%.

     

    So, for people who want to reproduce your results: Keep in mind that John has bought a 10Ah battery pack that actually achieves the claimed capacity and the pack he has, achieves a reasonable to good conversion efficiency.

     

    To achieve even longer runtimes, get a B+ or A+. I have measured my "A+" run at around 100mA, meaning you'd get a full two days out of your 10Ah pack!

  • in reply to Problemchild

    Thank you sir,

     

    You are a gentleman and a scholar!