PiSugar 3 Plus and other pi gpio hats

#1

Since the gpio is pin compatible with pi 4 would the PiSugar 3 plus work with the 5a? Software aside, of course.

Has anyone tested any other pi hats?

#2

As it seems to connect only the I2C (and power pins of course) should be save. I use my 5A with a Argon ONE.V2 case, which also powers the board and communicates over I2C. The only thing, 5V3A might be not enough depending on additional HW. My 5B for instance equipped with 16Gb, NVME SSD and an USB3-HUB takes 18W under heavy load (9W in idle).

#3

Thanks, I plan to use it as a UPS for a car stereo project. Need it to gracefully shut down when ignition is turned off.

I’ll update once my 5a arrives today.

#4

I’m looking at something similar using a CarPiHat. I looked at the power section of the schematic, and I expect it will be fine, though I suspect the power button might not work correctly.

#5

So it powers the rock 5a without issue. Now just need to modify a few things in the pisugar scripts to allow for power loss detection, power button, etc.

#6

Should be enough to change the i2c bus number for most things. What is not easy is to use the power off button. RPi’s don’t have a poweroff of the board, so on most HW I have seen it works by sending a power off to the HAT, then halting the RPI, and the HAT switches off the power after some seconds. On Rocks, there is a poweroff in HW. So the typical effect is you can it power off, but not on (because the board expects the power on button pressed if it was in poweroff-state…). I have no solution for this problem yet.
It should work by modifying the kernel and deactivating the poweroff code, but I looked into that yet.