I’ve been testing some of my Sleepy Pi prototype boards and am just about to order a number of next revision boards.
I’d love to give out some of this next batch of boards to the community to test out.
I actually designed this as an add-on to a humane Mouse-trap. These are all well and good, but if you don't check them every day, the poor mouse still snuffs it. The idea of the Sleepy Pi is that it'll implement a "Wake-n-mouse" (as opposed to Wake-on-lan 
) and take a photo of the captive mouse and either tweet or email it to me.
In terms of functionality the Sleepy Pi is essentially a Smart Power Management board for the Raspberry Pi that includes a low power Arduino that stays powered when the Raspberry Pi is off. In this way it can reduce the overall power used by the RPi, particularly when powered from batteries in applications where the RPi doesn’t need to be on all the time. You can think of it as adding a “Sleep” mode to the Raspberry Pi, because the Arduino can periodically wake the RPi up to perform a task and then put it back to sleep. As a side benefit you also get some Arduino I/O to play with, like Analogue Inputs and PWM’s.
Key functions:
- Reduce the effective Power consumption of the Raspberry Pi
- Power directly from batteries up to 17V
- Adds Arduino I/O to the Raspberry Pi such as Analogue In or PWM
- Break out the Raspberry Pi GPIO & Arduino I/O to screw terminals
- Prototyping area and expansion headers for daughter boards
- Power button for manual switch on/off
- “Wake” or “Sleep” in response to events or triggers such as:
- Analogue value crosses a threshold
- Digital input changes
- Specific time to “wake” via Real-time Clock
Is this something people could use? Can you think of an applications you'd use one for?
I would love to hear any feedback. You can contact me either through the forum or on my blog at http:www.spellfoundry.com
Jon
