For Science

After building and testing the Raspberry Pi Supply Switch I moved on to adding an lcd display and rotary encoder. I sort of forgot how to wire the Pi Supply switch to Raspberry Pi. After figuring it out all over again I decided to document it.

First of all, if you haven’t build a Power supply switch yet, here are detailed instruction and the Eagle files on how to do so on a single sided PCB.

Connecting the two goes like this:

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Turning a Raspberry pi into a internet radio player is fun, but safely powering down requires (access to) a computer. The people of pi-supply.com launched a successful kickstarter project and now have a pretty device available to switch a Raspberry Pi on and off. Where the off signal triggers a halt command on the Raspberry Pi so it shuts down properly. All of it is open source so buy a small one of pi-supply.com or build a bigger one yourself and read on.

The schematic is shared and I ported it to Cadsoft Eagle for convenience. Instead of having two switches on the board I decided to have two pinheaders there only. I recon that in practice you want the on and of switches not per se near the power cables and I might build it all into a small case and then I definitely don’t need the switches on the board. The third switch, the hard off, I don’t need as it’s basically the same as unplugging the power cable.

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Building the schematic on a breadboard is one thing, hooking it up to the router is another.

First things first.

In part 1 I showed the build of the initial schematic with the display working. Please note that the firmware loaded at that time was from the enhanced version. The firmware belonging to the initial version does not show anything on the display unless it’s hooked up to the router and the scripts there are running.

So if you’re going to build the schematic on a breadboard you should build the final version of the schematic with the improved firmware.

When you connect the breadboard to the router here are a few things that can (and in my case did) went wrong.

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