New improved hardware design, packaging and guide samples, a competition and more!
over 10 years ago – Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 11:45:36 AM

Hi all,

We are getting closer and closer to shipping every day and have a fair bit of news to share with you today...

New improved hardware design

As you know, we had 50 samples of the PiJuice v1.5 board made a couple of months ago and since then have been actively working on the firmware, software and other aspects of the project delivery that needed our attention before shipping. Everything has been progressing extremely well, and we are moving forward on all fronts.

However, as part of some other work, we discovered a new method by which we could achieve the required functionality needed for the PiJuice but with around half the components by making use of a (fairly new) IC in place of some custom circuitry we built out with discrete components. As any engineer will know, this is always a welcome change and the underside of the PCBs now looks even better and less cluttered...

Another added bonus is that the firmware is actually easier for this design as a lot of the "heavy lifting" is handled by the new IC - meaning less work on firmware (which is also good because it means less bugs, less time programming and less chance for errors - we like all of these things!). We have also made some further improvements as part of this new design - we have added an additional user programmable switch and an additional user programmable LED, header space for an off-board switch, the ability to re-program the onboard chips completely in software (the old design required you to move a jumper on a header to a different position), an EEPROM that can be disabled in software so that additional HATs with EEPROMs can be stacked on top without any issues (on the previous design this was also done with a jumper/header combo).

As you can see from the pictures above, we already have samples of this new design assembled and back with us. We have already performed basic tests on the device which have been successful and will begin some more thorough benchmarking tests next week. We also aim to get some sent out to some friends to use in some real life scenarios in order to really be able to give some "working examples" of battery life etc.

On a side note, we have also added two additional features, but these are what we call "unsupported extras" (if you play with these, we will not be able to provide as comprehensive support) and are recommended for advance users only. Firstly, we have designed in a way to bypass the temperature sensing of the battery meaning you could use this with any 3.7v single cell lipo, regardless of whether it has temperature sensing built in. Also, we have created a way to allow you to use any solar panel with the device - again it will require some custom soldering and may not work as expected - but it is now possible. These were two features that we had a fair few requests for from people planning some pretty cool projects so since we had the chance to throw them in we thought we might as well.

You may remember that we were also having an issue with a pogo pin that was too short to touch the board, which would cause issues with the soft shutdown and wake on alarm features. Pogo pins do not have a huge amount of variety to them, and due to their relatively complex construction custom made versions were expensive and had prohibitively long lead times. On the new v2.2 PiJuice design shown above, we were able to reduce the size of the caps which meant that the option of reducing the height of the header was now a possibility. So we have now sourced a custom made header which is 1mm shorter than the "off the shelf" versions we were using before. We have samples of this on their way to us with a courier as we speak, and as soon as they arrive and we have tested them with the new v2.2 PiJuice we should be able to have production quantities (5000 pcs) of the header manufactured for us within a couple of weeks.

Packaging design

In our last update we mentioned we have a draft packaging design. We wanted to keep it simple but attractive, and of course sufficiently protective. To start with, we have the draft artwork design - with placeholder text:

The initial (blank) samples are shown here assembled:

User guide

Once again we wanted to keep the PiJuice user guide simple but elegant. Once again this only has placeholder text in it for now but we hope you like the general look of it:

Black Piday - Pi Zero competition and discount

You have almost certainly already heard that there is a new Pi in town - the Pi Zero. They are sold out pretty much everywhere, but in case you missed out we are giving one away in our competition. Just click on the picture below to enter for your chance to win a Pi Zero - and best of all it is easy to increase your chance of winning - for every referral entry you get, you receive an additional 3 entries to the competition...

Since yesterday was Black Friday, Thanksgiving the day before that and of course Cyber Monday in two days time, we are running a "Black Piday" promotion on our website at the moment. For this we have up to 50% off on selected products and 15% off storewide with the promo code BLACKPIDAY at checkout. Check out the banner here:

Thanks as always,
Aaron and the Pi Supply team

50 unit sample problems, sticker order, packaging, batteries and more!
over 10 years ago – Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 03:13:57 AM

Dear Backers,

We have been hard at work getting things ready on the PiJuice and progressing towards full manufacture and shipping.

There has been A LOT going on, and many aspects of the project are starting to fall in to place now we have the hardware designs finished.

Lets get right to it...

50 unit samples and part selection problems

As you know from one of our previous updates, after successfully testing the first samples of the final board design we proceeded with a 50 unit sample run with the factory in order to allow us to have more units for final testing as well as to check the manufacturing procedure is all up to scratch.

We received the 50 units about 2 weeks ago, and upon opening the package we were very disappointed to see that our Chinese manufacturer had substituted some of the capacitors (the big silver aluminium ones) for some lower quality parts. Usually this would not be an issue, but we actually rely on the ripple current of the caps for some of the functionality of the PiJuice. Additionally, they were so large mechanically compared to the original part we had specified that they hit the RasPi!

This was obviously quite frustrating, but after all this is why we do samples runs - to iron out any errors before a full production run.

As you can see from the pictures above, we quickly swapped out the capacitors and have now got the boards working as they should. There was also a resistor which was the wrong value, and we swapped these out at the same time.

Sticker Order

We just pulled the plug and ordered the PiJuice stickers. We have 10,000 of them on their way to our Chinese assembly plant, where they will eventually find their way into every PiJuice box!

The design is pretty simple, but with all the complexities we have been facing on the hardware, we thought simple would be the best way to go...

Packaging and guides

We have already sent one of the 50 units from the sample order to our packaging manufacturer in China. As soon as they receive it they will then hand-make a packaging sample for us. Once this is approved, they will send us an artwork template which we will then populate with the artwork (again, we are going for quite simple here) and then send us some printed samples (around 4 or 5). Once approved they will then push on with the full manufacturing run as soon as possible as the size and shape of PiJuice will not be changing any more so this is something we can do in the interim whilst we finish the software and firmware.

We have decided what projects we are going to feature in the small user guide that will be as follows:

• Remote camera systems including use of time-lapse.
• Weather station including data logging (wait to find engineer)
• Building a Compact robot with PiJuice and a Raspberry Pi
• Portable Pocket Pi (camera optional)
• Portable digital radio / media streamer
• DIY games console
• Car Computer solution
• Greenhouse monitor

We are no longer going to be featuring the full projects here, as the content will just be too much to fit in a small handbook inside the packaging, but we will be featuring a selection of content and nice graphics, with the full guides available on the website. The user guide will also include compliance data relating to the FCC and CE testing etc.

Our graphic designer, Louis, is already underway on creating some nice designs for the user guide and we will share these with you as soon as we have anything to show.

Batteries and laser cut surround

We have found a good, reliable, source for batteries, and alongside the 50 unit sample order had some delivered to us for testing. So far they are looking extremely promising. At the moment we are just testing the off the shelf ones which have a capacity of around 1390 mAh.

We are working with the manufacturer to see if we can increase this within the timeframe we have, however we do not want this process to delay shipping any further. We will do our best to deliver the biggest capacity battery we can inside the BP6X shell, but we can't promise anything above the off the shelf capacity at this point. As soon as we have final details on this we will be sure to share them.

One of the battery samples is shown below, although the final battery will also have a custom printed label featuring the PiJuice logo!

The laser cut surround is now pretty much finished and we have started getting quotes for the manufacture of this part. As you can see from the photo below we have reduced the amount of plastic used, and wastage by a significant amount by changing it from a "C shape" to an "L shape" - we still need to test this a bit more to make sure it holds the battery nice and securely but so far it is proving to be a much more elegant design (and nicer for the environment)....

We have also been extremely fortunate in that some good friends of ours have given us a small laser engraver/cutter for free - this means we can much more quickly and easily generate prototypes for this part, which is a great thing. We have a couple more ideas for improvements which will probably make their way in before the final order is placed. We will also at some point share this design with the backers so you can create custom colours, sizes etc.

Because you can't say no to free lasers :-)

Pogo pin

We have had a few problems sourcing a pogo pin - which is very important as it allows you to power cycle your Raspberry Pi when it is plugged in through the Raspberry Pis own micro USB power input (rather than the on board PiJuice micro USB input). We have now found a manufacturer who can custom make us a suitable pogo pin and we are about to go ahead with this process as after many hours of searching we have yet to find an off the shelf solution that is suitable for our needs. The easier solution would be to reduce the height of the plastic on the PiJuice header connector, but unfortunately this would mean the aluminium caps would touch the Raspberry Pi which is an even worse problem than the pogo pin one!

Since we still have work to do on the firmware before manufacture, hopefully these pieces should all start to come together at the same time, however the pogo pin will take around 4 to 6 weeks until we have the full quantity in stock.

Other stuff...

Once the firmware is further along, we will be sending out some of the PiJuice samples to some of our skilled friends and community members to thoroughly test both the hardware, firmware and software. Hopefully they will not identify any issues as we have already thoroughly tested these but we want to be sure!

We may have one or two units going spare which we will probably send out to a lucky backer who is interested in being part of the testing process...we are trying to think of a fair way to do this as we know a lot of you will be extremely keen to be the lucky person. If you have any ideas about how we could do this fairly, please suggest them in the comments? We will share more details on this later on.

Thanks, as always, for your patience,
Aaron and the Pi Supply / PiJuice team

50 unit sample problems, sticker order, packaging, batteries and more!
over 10 years ago – Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 04:05:13 PM

Dear Backers,

We have been hard at work getting things ready on the PiJuice and progressing towards full manufacture and shipping.

There has been A LOT going on, and many aspects of the project are starting to fall in to place now we have the hardware designs finished.

Lets get right to it...

50 unit samples and part selection problems

As you know from one of our previous updates, after successfully testing the first samples of the final board design we proceeded with a 50 unit sample run with the factory in order to allow us to have more units for final testing as well as to check the manufacturing procedure is all up to scratch.

We received the 50 units about 2 weeks ago, and upon opening the package we were very disappointed to see that our Chinese manufacturer had substituted some of the capacitors (the big silver aluminium ones) for some lower quality parts. Usually this would not be an issue, but we actually rely on the ripple current of the caps for some of the functionality of the PiJuice. Additionally, they were so large mechanically compared to the original part we had specified that they hit the RasPi!

This was obviously quite frustrating, but after all this is why we do samples runs - to iron out any errors before a full production run.

As you can see from the pictures above, we quickly swapped out the capacitors and have now got the boards working as they should. There was also a resistor which was the wrong value, and we swapped these out at the same time.

Sticker Order

We just pulled the plug and ordered the PiJuice stickers. We have 10,000 of them on their way to our Chinese assembly plant, where they will eventually find their way into every PiJuice box!

The design is pretty simple, but with all the complexities we have been facing on the hardware, we thought simple would be the best way to go...

Packaging and guides

We have already sent one of the 50 units from the sample order to our packaging manufacturer in China. As soon as they receive it they will then hand-make a packaging sample for us. Once this is approved, they will send us an artwork template which we will then populate with the artwork (again, we are going for quite simple here) and then send us some printed samples (around 4 or 5). Once approved they will then push on with the full manufacturing run as soon as possible as the size and shape of PiJuice will not be changing any more so this is something we can do in the interim whilst we finish the software and firmware.

We have decided what projects we are going to feature in the small user guide that will be as follows:

• Remote camera systems including use of time-lapse.
• Weather station including data logging (wait to find engineer)
• Building a Compact robot with PiJuice and a Raspberry Pi
• Portable Pocket Pi (camera optional)
• Portable digital radio / media streamer
• DIY games console
• Car Computer solution
• Greenhouse monitor

We are no longer going to be featuring the full projects here, as the content will just be too much to fit in a small handbook inside the packaging, but we will be featuring a selection of content and nice graphics, with the full guides available on the website. The user guide will also include compliance data relating to the FCC and CE testing etc.

Our graphic designer, Louis, is already underway on creating some nice designs for the user guide and we will share these with you as soon as we have anything to show.

Batteries and laser cut surround

We have found a good, reliable, source for batteries, and alongside the 50 unit sample order had some delivered to us for testing. So far they are looking extremely promising. At the moment we are just testing the off the shelf ones which have a capacity of around 1390 mAh.

We are working with the manufacturer to see if we can increase this within the timeframe we have, however we do not want this process to delay shipping any further. We will do our best to deliver the biggest capacity battery we can inside the BP6X shell, but we can't promise anything above the off the shelf capacity at this point. As soon as we have final details on this we will be sure to share them.

One of the battery samples is shown below, although the final battery will also have a custom printed label featuring the PiJuice logo!

The laser cut surround is now pretty much finished and we have started getting quotes for the manufacture of this part. As you can see from the photo below we have reduced the amount of plastic used, and wastage by a significant amount by changing it from a "C shape" to an "L shape" - we still need to test this a bit more to make sure it holds the battery nice and securely but so far it is proving to be a much more elegant design (and nicer for the environment)....

We have also been extremely fortunate in that some good friends of ours have given us a small laser engraver/cutter for free - this means we can much more quickly and easily generate prototypes for this part, which is a great thing. We have a couple more ideas for improvements which will probably make their way in before the final order is placed. We will also at some point share this design with the backers so you can create custom colours, sizes etc.

Because you can't say no to free lasers :-)

Pogo pin

We have had a few problems sourcing a pogo pin - which is very important as it allows you to power cycle your Raspberry Pi when it is plugged in through the Raspberry Pis own micro USB power input (rather than the on board PiJuice micro USB input). We have now found a manufacturer who can custom make us a suitable pogo pin and we are about to go ahead with this process as after many hours of searching we have yet to find an off the shelf solution that is suitable for our needs. The easier solution would be to reduce the height of the plastic on the PiJuice header connector, but unfortunately this would mean the aluminium caps would touch the Raspberry Pi which is an even worse problem than the pogo pin one!

Since we still have work to do on the firmware before manufacture, hopefully these pieces should all start to come together at the same time, however the pogo pin will take around 4 to 6 weeks until we have the full quantity in stock.

Other stuff...

Once the firmware is further along, we will be sending out some of the PiJuice samples to some of our skilled friends and community members to thoroughly test both the hardware, firmware and software. Hopefully they will not identify any issues as we have already thoroughly tested these but we want to be sure!

We may have one or two units going spare which we will probably send out to a lucky backer who is interested in being part of the testing process...we are trying to think of a fair way to do this as we know a lot of you will be extremely keen to be the lucky person. If you have any ideas about how we could do this fairly, please suggest them in the comments? We will share more details on this later on.

Thanks, as always, for your patience,
Aaron and the Pi Supply / PiJuice team

IMPORTANT: BackerKit double charging
over 10 years ago – Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 09:11:10 AM

Dear Backers,

We have had some reports last week from a number of backers who added add-on products to their order on BackerKit saying they had been charged multiple times for their add ons. (If you did not order any add-ons on BackerKit you can ignore this message as it will not apply to you).

We use BackerKit for the management of these additional pledges, and BackerKit in turn use Stripe as their payment processor.

We obviously took these requests quite seriously and upon investigation we could not even see these double charges in either our BackerKit or Stripe account meaning we had no idea what had happened.

We contacted BackerKit and Stripe in order to investigate the problem and received the following email reply from Stripe:

Hi there, We have had reports that a limited number of charges that were created on the 9th of September appeared twice on cardholder statements. I'm reaching out because your account was one of those affected by the incident. Whilst your customer was charged twice, you'll only be able to see one charge in the Dashboard. We've investigated and found this was caused by a processing error after the charges were submitted. The root cause has now been resolved. We have processed reversals for all duplicated charges. These will be visible to the cardholder's bank today (Tuesday). Depending on the cardholder's bank, the duplicated charge will either be removed altogether from the customer's statement, or it will be shown as a refunded transaction alongside it -- timings for when this is reflected on the statement will also vary by bank. This means that your customers will only be charged for the original transaction amount once, and not twice. You do not need to do anything further -- all reversals will be applied automatically. We understand that this may have caused an inconvenience to you and your affected customers, and offer full apologies for this. Please be assured that we're available to help. If you have any further questions or require further assistance, please simply reply to this email. Alice

As it says in the message, any additional payments made should now have been reversed. We just wanted to reach out, explain the situation, and make sure that anyone who was charged twice could check their statement and ensure they were correctly refunded.

If you have not been correctly refunded, you have found any incorrect transactions on your statement, or you have any other questions or enquiries about this please email [email protected] with your concerns, and please also make sure to copy in [email protected] and [email protected] so we can all keep up to date on your enquiry.

Thanks for your understanding,
Aaron and the PiJuice team

IMPORTANT: BackerKit double charging
over 10 years ago – Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 12:30:26 AM

Dear Backers,

We have had some reports last week from a number of backers who added add-on products to their order on BackerKit saying they had been charged multiple times for their add ons. (If you did not order any add-ons on BackerKit you can ignore this message as it will not apply to you).

We use BackerKit for the management of these additional pledges, and BackerKit in turn use Stripe as their payment processor.

We obviously took these requests quite seriously and upon investigation we could not even see these double charges in either our BackerKit or Stripe account meaning we had no idea what had happened.

We contacted BackerKit and Stripe in order to investigate the problem and received the following email reply from Stripe:

Hi there, We have had reports that a limited number of charges that were created on the 9th of September appeared twice on cardholder statements. I'm reaching out because your account was one of those affected by the incident. Whilst your customer was charged twice, you'll only be able to see one charge in the Dashboard. We've investigated and found this was caused by a processing error after the charges were submitted. The root cause has now been resolved. We have processed reversals for all duplicated charges. These will be visible to the cardholder's bank today (Tuesday). Depending on the cardholder's bank, the duplicated charge will either be removed altogether from the customer's statement, or it will be shown as a refunded transaction alongside it -- timings for when this is reflected on the statement will also vary by bank. This means that your customers will only be charged for the original transaction amount once, and not twice. You do not need to do anything further -- all reversals will be applied automatically. We understand that this may have caused an inconvenience to you and your affected customers, and offer full apologies for this. Please be assured that we're available to help. If you have any further questions or require further assistance, please simply reply to this email. Alice

As it says in the message, any additional payments made should now have been reversed. We just wanted to reach out, explain the situation, and make sure that anyone who was charged twice could check their statement and ensure they were correctly refunded.

If you have not been correctly refunded, you have found any incorrect transactions on your statement, or you have any other questions or enquiries about this please email [email protected] with your concerns, and please also make sure to copy in [email protected] and [email protected] so we can all keep up to date on your enquiry.

Thanks for your understanding,
Aaron and the PiJuice team