PiJuice Zero is the ultimate portable project platform for your Raspberry Pi Zero!

When plugged into any source, the PiJuice Zero acts as an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) using intelligent power management to keep your Raspberry Pi Zero going. PiJuice Zero will also stay charged, so you can take your projects with you anywhere. With an onboard Real-Time Clock (RTC), programmable LEDs and switches, user-friendly software and much more, PiJuice Zero gives you maximum control and flexibility for all your Raspberry Pi Zero projects…wherever you want to take them.

We launched the PiJuice HAT on Kickstarter in 2015 and it was a roaring success. Since launching and shipping that campaign, the most common question we get is "when are you doing a PiJuice for the Raspberry Pi Zero?" - so here it is.

Intelligent, Portable Battery Power For your Raspberry Pi Zero

From cute little robots, to wildlife monitoring, uninterruptible battery backups and a whole host of other applications PiJuice has enabled a new generation of portable Raspberry Pi projects. But have you ever wondered what other projects you could create if you had a smaller solution, compatible with the Pi Zero and in a tiny form factor? That is exactly why we created PiJuice Zero…to open the door to new possibilities.

The low profile header on the PiJuice Zero allows you to reduce the footprint of your portable-powered Raspberry Pi to a fraction of what was possible before. And with any single-cell LiPo/LiIon battery supported, as well as solar panels, you can easily take your Pi off grid and power it 24/7.

Possible use cases enabled by PiJuice Zero:

• portable Pi
• RasPi portable games console
• point and shoot camera
• weather station
• compact robot
• and many many more! What will you make?!?

Features, Unboxing and Specifications

The PiJuice Zero is a complete wireless off-grid power solution for your Raspberry Pi Zero. Packed with powerful features PiJuice Zero can help you shrink your portable Raspberry Pi projects like never before. As you can see from the crowded circuit board (105 components on there!), our engineers have worked tirelessly to ensure that PiJuice Zero retains all of the key features that you know and love from the PiJuice HAT, but in a format approximately half the size.

Key Features

• Compatible with any single cell lithium polymer (LiPo) battery (including our range of PiJuice batteries!)
• A full uninterrupted power supply solution for the Raspberry Pi Zero
• Integrated real-time clock
• Onboard intelligent on/off switch
• Low power deep-sleep state with wake on interrupt/calendar event
• 2 x programmable multi-coloured RGB LEDs
• Our revolutionary PiAnywhere technology - the best way to take your Pi off the grid!
• Full power management API available to Raspberry Pi OS with auto shutdown capability when running low on batteries
• Raspberry Pi pHAT layout - designed to exactly fit the Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W. For use with Raspberry Pi A+, B+, 2B, 3B, 3B+, 4B - we recommend an additional stacking header for best operation, or better yet - just use PiJuice HAT module.
• Low profile design (10 g and 65 x 30 x 8 mm total dimensions), to fit inside the smallest of projects and possibly even inside some existing cases!
• Bring your own battery - this pHAT does not come with a battery. However, we offer a selection of batteries. When paired with our mating cable (one is provided with PiJuice Zero, additional are available separately) it is easy to use any battery with your PiJuice with simple crimp connectors.
• Fully CE and FCC tested, just like the original PiJuice HAT to enable use in educational and industrial settings

Of course the PiJuice family also includes a variety of solar panels, cases and other accessories to make your portable projects a success!

Unboxing Video

Technical Specs

The image above highlights the main ICs used on PiJuice. Links to the various datasheets have been provided in line with the description.

1. Microcontroller is an ST Micro STM32F030CCT6 ARM Cortex-M0, 48MHz, F64KB, R8KB, I2C, SPI, USART, 2.4-3.6V
2. Charge IC - BQ24160RGET Charger IC Lithium-Ion/Polymer, 2.5A, 4.2-10V
3. Fuel gauge IC - LC709203FQH-01TWG Battery Fuel Gauge, 1-Cell Li-ion, 2.8%
4. High side power-distribution switch - NCP380LMUAJAATBG Fixed/Adjustable Current‐Limiting Power‐Distribution Switch

If you would like to find more information about the PiJuice Zero pinout, hardware and other information relating to technical specification you can find that info on our PiJuice GitHub Hardware README.

Software Suite

The PiJuices battery backup and charging functionality works plug-and-play, right out of the box, with no software required.

However, when we were conceiving the idea behind PiJuice and prototyping and designing the boards, it quickly became clear to us that one of the most important features behind the PiJuice would be the software interface and how it allows you to manipulate and read the hardware. It seemed essential to us that it could behave in a similarly intuitive way to what you know and expect with other devices like phones, tablets and laptops…but in true maker fashion it should also offer you far more control over the hardware, firmware on software so you could customise your projects to as great an extent as possible right down to the low level stuff.

We therefore have designed a feature-packged graphical user interface (GUI) which has low level integration with the Raspberry Pi operating system. As you can see from the above screenshot it provides a system tray icon, with battery percentage and power source / charging information so you can really be in control of your power.

The above picture shows an example of one of the tabs of the GUI and some of the information available to you. For those of you that have embedded applications or want to save space on your SD card (or just you Linux lovers that prever vim to GUIs), the same information and control of PiJuice is available without the GUI as well. We have two Debian packages - pijuice-base (the core stuff) and pijuice-gui (the graphical stuff) so you can just pick the bits you want! You can install these using apt-get in the same way you would with any software on the Raspbery Pi.

You can find more out about the software, all of the features and menus, and even dig into and contribute to the code at our PiJuice GitHub page. We are constantly improving the software and firmware and adding new functionality to make the PiJuice platform even better than it already is.

Comparisons

PiJuice and PiJuice Zero

Manufacturing Plan

We currently manufacture our PiJuice HATs in China with a manufacturing partner called (Sunsoar Tech) that we have worked with now for over 6 years. They are reliable and the quality is as you would expect from a Pi Supply product. We have produced "golden samples" (production prototypes) with Sunsoar already and these are what you see in the photos for the campaign and the same boards that have been sent out to reviewers for this campaign. We have primed Sunsoar and have the bulk manufacturing quotes ready to go. As soon as we hit our funding target we will place the orders with the manufacturer and expect them to finish the boards around 8 to 10 weeks later, possibly sooner if the winds are in our favour.

Here is a video of some of our PCBAs from a previous Kickstarter campaign of ours (IoT LoRa Boards) so you can see some of our boards in manufacture at Sunsoar:

Shipping and Fulfillment

As per usual with Crowd Supply, we will ship the PiJuice Zero boards and all other pledge items directly to Crowd Supply. All orders will then be delivered to backers using Crowd Supply’s fulfillment service. Delivery within the US is included in the listed price (costing between \$6 and \$12 depending on weight) while delivery outside the US will incur the shipping surcharge listed for each pledge level. We use delivery duty paid (DDP) shipping via courier, so import duty/VAT is covered for EU, AU and Switzerland. So if in one of those countries, what you see is what you pay! All other countries may assess their own taxes/fees on the package, and the receiver will assume that fee.

For more information, please see Crowd Supply’s guide on ordering, paying, and shipping.

Risks and Challenges

The electronics design, packaging design and all other aspects of the project are already finalised and tested and working great, so there isn’t much risk associated with the design. We already have production quality units in hand and they have been confirmed to be working correctly. The main risks and challenges are the supply of the components and assembly of the associated electronics as well as the reliability of the shipping networks.

Fortunately the manufacturer we are working with is one we have successfully used many times before and we know and trust they can deliver to schedule. As an established and busy e-commerce business Nebra are easily capable of handling the shipping burden of this project to Crowd Supply, and Crowd Supply have a tried and tested fulfillment service. We both have all the frameworks in place to achieve this quickly and efficiently. Whilst delays do unfortunately sometimes occur with shipping networks these are relatively infrequent and we will do our best to mitigate these at the time of shipping.

With current component availability, a 2000 unit batch of boards would take about 8 to 10 weeks to produce. However we sincerely hope we can beat that and ship sooner. We will place the production order immediately when the campaign is fully funded.

Support and Documentation

Software, code examples, hardware overviews, schematics and a vast array of other information is available at our PiJuice GitHub

We also have a PiJuice Zero quick start guide available on our Maker Zone as well as a number of projects on our Instructables and Hackster.io pages.

Here are some really cool PiJuice projects that we have found over the years:

• NatureJuice - made by our good friend (and ex employee) Francesco Vannini, this project actually features a PiJuice Zero, one of our 5000 mAh batteries and one of our 40 watt solar panels for a remote, wireless nature monitoring setup!
• Power outage monitor (using PiJuice and PaPiRus) by Frederick Vandenbosch. You can find pictures and code here
• Build a wildlife camera using a Raspberry Pi and PiJuice by Electromaker
• CarPi - a Raspberry Pi, PiJuice and a HifiBerry all living neatly in a dashboard running Android Auto! by Rick Tonoli
• PiJuice on Windows IoT Core! You can find the code here