Maker kit progress
about 6 years ago – Thu, Feb 06, 2020 at 11:32:01 PM

Hey again,

Just to let you know the Maker Kit cases have now arrived! So we are now just waiting on the Media Center HATs to come in before we can ship!

Here are some pictures of the cases below:

Sorry about the quality of the photos, they were taken quickly on a phone.

We have sent the case to our photographer to get some better shots as well which we should have soon.

Despite the issues with Coronavirus in China we are still hoping to be on track to deliver around the end of February however there is a small possibility that this might slip by a couple of weeks. We will keep you posted as we know more.

Thanks,

The Pi Supply team

Maker Kits shipping in February
about 6 years ago – Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 05:32:32 PM

Hi all,

We have some good news for those of you who have been patiently waiting for PiJuice Maker Kits - the final pledges that need to be shipped to complete this Kickstarter campaign.

Production is nearing completion on both the cases and the Media Center HAT boards.

Unfortunately we are just about to enter the Chinese New Year holiday season which runs from 18th Jan to 3rd Feb for our manufacturer of the Media Center HAT.

We therefore expect to be shipping the Maker Kits out to all backers around the end of February.

If you are one of these people we would highly recommend you go to https://pijuice.backerkit.com and check your shipping address is correct.

If it is not correct please send us a comment here or send us an email to [email protected]

Thanks,

The Pi Supply team

PiJuice Zero is live on Crowd Supply!
almost 7 years ago – Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 02:28:12 AM

Hey all,

Just a quick one to let you know that PiJuice Zero is now live on Crowd Supply!

Take a look at the project and make a pledge today :-)

Thanks,

The PiJuice team

Maker Kits, software and firmware update, PiJuice Zero, video / photo content
almost 7 years ago – Thu, Jun 20, 2019 at 10:34:00 PM

Hi there,

Just a quick update for you today...let's get started...

Maker Kits

We are making progress (albeit slow progress) on the Media Center HATs which are the last thing holding up the Maker Kits currently. Everything is underway but lots of delays on a bunch of parts. As soon as we have an update on when we should start to have boards come off the production line we will let you know. 

Software and firmware update

We have just published a software update to the PiJuice Base and PiJuice GUI software packages - kicking the version number to v1.5. The reason for this update is mainly to update the firmware version to v1.3 which we have been testing successfully for some time now and incorporating changes to the software to account for additional features that the new firmware enables. Huge thanks go to Ton van Overbeek for all of these updates and to Milan Neskovic for the firmware updates!

Here are the changelog entries for pijuice base and pijuice_cli:

  pijuice-base (1.5) unstable; urgency=low

   * Support for new features in firmware 1.3

     - Alternative method for measuring the charge of the battery by the MCU directly

       in case the fuel gauge IC is not available or is faulty.

     - Extended battery profile with parameters for the alternative method

     - Added option to force use of the alternative method.

     - More predefined battery profiles: BP6X_1400, BP7X_1820, SNN5843_2300,

       PJLIPO_12000, PJLIPO_5000, PJBP7X_1600, PJSNN5843_1300, PJZERO_1200,

       PJZERO_1000, PJLIPO_600, PJLIPO_500.

     - Use IO2 digital input as source for wakeup enabling peripheral attached to

       the P3 header to wake-up Raspberry Pi.

     - Added alternative wakeup via RPi GPIO3 (used as I2C SCL after boot) if run pin

       is not connected (no pogo pin) and PiJuice powered via RPi.

   * pijuice.py

     - Added support for commands for the firmware 1.3 features 

   * pijuice_cli.py

     - Works with both 1.2 qnd 1.3 firmware. 1.3 firmware features only shown when

       1.3 firmware is present.

     - Better feedback during firmware update.

    pijuice-gui (1.5) unstable; urgency=low

   * pijuice_gui.py

     - Support for new features in firmware 1.3 (See pijuice-base changelog).

     - Works with both firmware 1.2 and 1.3. New features are only shown after

       firmware 1.3 is loaded.

     - Improved firmeware update (added progressbar display).

The software packages have now been submitted to the Raspbian repos and should be live there in a day or so we hope, which means you should soon be able to update them by just running sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade commands at the terminal. We highly recommend updating the software to v1.5 and then subsequently updating the firmware on the PiJuice to v1.3 as it brings with it some very useful upgrades especially in regard to how it measures the battery percentage more accurately.

We should have more updates to the software and documentation coming soon as well - to support the PiJuice Zero which as you will see below we are launching quite soon...

PiJuice Zero launch - coming soon to Crowd Supply!

You may remember from an update around this time last year that we mentioned we were working on a product called PiJuice Zero which is a dinky Pi Zero sized version of our beloved PiJuice HAT to enable you to make your portable projects even smaller!

It is essentially a reduced feature set version of its older sibling the PiJuice HAT - the key differences being the smaller footprint, lack of onboard battery, and less buttons and LEDs.

Here are some pictures of the production prototypes:

The good news is that we are very nearly ready to launch PiJuice Zero! We are planning for it to go live on Crowd Supply (if you don't know Crowd Supply you should definitely check it out!) on Thursday 27th June currently. Which is about 1 week from today.

If you would like to be notified when it goes live, you can click through to the following link and sign up for email updates when it launched:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/pi-supply/pijuice-zero

Tutorial, video and photo content?

Have you done a project, or tutorial with PiJuice? Have you taken photos or videos of them?

If so, we would be delighted if you could share them with us either as a comment to this update or via our Twitter page by tweeting to @PiSupply - https://twitter.com/PiSupply

We would be more than happy to promote, share and link to anything you are working on!

Thanks,

The PiJuice team

Maker kits update
almost 7 years ago – Wed, May 15, 2019 at 11:54:24 PM

Hi Maker Kit backers,

We just wanted to let you know that after Farnell / Embest letting us down on the manufacture of the Media Center HAT it has been very slow going getting the Maker Kits finished for a variety of reasons.

We had to move manufacture to a different factory, and because they refused to sell us the components that were all already in stock for the boards for a reasonable price (they wanted to mark up considerably from cost price despite not having any reason to) we unfortunately were forced to start from scratch in terms of purchasing as well.

However - the good news is that we are now at the point where we are about to receive the first golden samples of the boards from the new factory (who is out long-term and trusted partner Sunsoar) and as soon as they are tested and approved we will immediately sign off on a batch of 1000 Media Center HAT boards. We expect this to be within the next few weeks.

This is the last piece of the puzzle as far as the Maker Kits are concerned - everything else is ready to go on them. At present, we expect that we will be able to commence shipping by end of June / early July...however this is an estimate. As soon as we give the go ahead on the 1k batch of Media Center HATs we will have a much clearer picture of when we can deliver these to you.

Thanks for your patience....and we look forward to finally bringing this to a close,

The Pi Supply team