Using Rock Pi S with powerbank

#1

Hi,

I have just purchased Rock Pi and I encountered problem with powerbank.
Power consumption at idle is too low for the powerbank to stay on. It just switches itself off while it “thinks” it has nothing attached. I tried two different powerbanks and result was the same. When connected to USB on running PC it is running all day fine.
It is running latest minimal image of Debian from NAND. No card is even present at this time. No WiFi or BT connection.

Is there any solution other than just put there some artificial load?

I will eventually connect some peripherals, but I like to be sure it does not switch off on self, while I plan to use it for some unattended data collection from RS485 and CAN.

Best regards

Vit Soucek

#2

Give it some load run a bash script or python with a sleep to create your load.
Sort of counter intuative to run that way on a battery but hey.

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
	echo "Do something"
	sleep 1
done

The time on the sleep should be able to set approx load and find something better than echo for load.

Save it chmod a+x and start it from your .profile

Or maybe overclock your Rock Pi S as might be enough and you get a perf bonus, but may still be low idle but you can edit the opp table.

Prob grab a dtb from SLARM or community running at 1.3Ghz

#3

OK. Thanks for answer. This seems reasonable and I understand low consumption on idle is more of a feature than flaw. I guess I will just check status of Overall load and WiFi status and change accordingly the sleep interval or something like this. I will not overclock. Rock Pi looks capable enough as is.