the PiJuice, short of a basic power brick, is the quickest and easiest way way to add power to a Pi Project. It's plug and play, snap it on the top and you have power. Add some software and you have fancy battery monitoring and control. It has nifty features like programmable LEDs and buttons. It has two notable downsides: 2.5 amp limit, which shouldn't be a problem for my project, and hat format means it adds a decent amount of vertical clearance to the Pi. it's a thicc board.
A large pair of pliers and a quick twist later:
and then we just snip those bits off -
and I flew too close to the sun and cracked my flush cutters
If that is god telling me I should have gotten a power board that fit instead of forcing in what I had, god should have made staying under budget easier on this project. New flush cutter coming tomorrow, but I'll be able to fit all three boards, LCD driver (blue) power (red) and pi (green)
since I want to use the power feature, I have to make sure the I²C pins connect, so when I do trim the top parts off, going to want to keep the 5v, gnd and 3 and 5 pins intact to plug in.
Now that i have the screen in hand and can get an idea of exactly where everything goes, it's time to work on the top plate.
Had a few prototyping blocks around, so will be using those to access 5V, 35 and ground on the fat block and various to be determined and hopefully swappable lines on the skinny one, hole on the bottom right is for the USB hub, and the big hole in the top left is for the headphone jack, little holes below the monitors are for LED's
Rev 1 didn't have the depth to fit the raspberry pi, rev 2 is on the printer right now:
test print on the bottom half of the deck, which is designed to hold the keyboard, mouse and a videogame controller. The keyboard case was the wrong size and the whole thing was about a cenimeter too short. Remeasure, reprint and move on.
width was due to me accidentally not replacing the default with the proper variable, keyboard outline was due to using the wrong revision of the keyboard, Onshape is handy but not being able to integrate it into my normal version control is a headache
waiting on a USB ttl cable so I can check and see if there is anything on the boot log, if I have to get a new pi that would more than double the budge of the build, bah.
Pulled some batteries out of my laptop that died previously in the project:
Here's a first draft layout for a french azerty keyboard, there are more extra characters than I would assume and I'm making some guess at how useful they are but it's not the worse start
Patrick Tait
