PiJuice - A Portable Project Platform For Every Raspberry Pi
Created by PiJuice Team
PiJuice is the ultimate module for all portable Raspberry Pi projects. Includes many fun maker projects and a solar power version too!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Expected first 2k ship date, github updates, PaPiRus and PiJuice
about 8 years ago
– Wed, Jan 10, 2018 at 07:42:25 PM
Hi all,
Another quick update for you...
Expected ship date of first 2k units
We have just been notified by Farnell / Embest that they are tentatively expecting to be shipping out the first 2k units on the 25th January. So just over 2 weeks! We are very excited. They will ship the units to Floship (our Hong Kong based fulfilment house) who will then ship them out in backer order to you backers. So the first units could be dropping on some of your doorsteps as soon as the first week of Feb with any luck.
We are going up to Leeds tomorrow afternoon for meetings with Farnell on Friday, so hopefully we should get some more information about progress on the PiJuice and Media Center HAT then and will share with you any pertinent information about that if there is anything new to share.
We are also asking Embest if they can share some video and photographic footage of the production process, so hopefully we might have that to share with you soon too.
GitHub Updates
As mentioned in the last update, we now have a full time software developer who is working extremely hard on the PiJuice software to make sure it is working perfectly before the end of the month! Obviously, like all software, it will be an ongoing effort (with the support of all you to squash bugs!) but we want to make sure it works very well when it gets there - and we are fortunate to have the feedback of all the reviewers so far.
We will likely be pushing an updated .deb file to the Raspbian repo in the next week. We have also got a firmware update to go out in the next 2 to 3 days, which should hopefully sneak in to the first 2k batch - but if not you can update the firmware as soon as you get the device anyway!
PaPiRus and PiJuice
One of the review units has found its way over to our good friend Frederick Vandenbosch. He surprised us on Twitter today with this:
As you can see, he is using the PaPiRus HAT with large (2.7") display, PiJuice and a Raspberry Pi A+. Knowing Frederick, there will be some code and a writeup soon and we will share it as soon as we see it :-)
Thanks, Aaron and the Pi Supply team
January is here! PiJuice HAT shipping beginning this month and other updates
over 8 years ago
– Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 12:34:31 AM
Hi all,
Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas holiday period and New Years Eve! That can only mean one thing...January is here...the month we begin PiJuice shipping! We are so excited there is not even words to describe it :-)
Farnell / Embest have confirmed a minimum of 2k units will ship this month and we have primed our fulfillment partners to expect them. We should receive the rest of the KS backers units just after Chinese New Year concludes in mid February. We are pushing to receive them all in January but only the first 2k have been confirmed so far...we will keep pushing hard!
New Resellers
We have got quite a few new resellers this last month, in addition to those already confirmed in previous updates, for the PiJuice and accessories, should you be looking to get a case or solar panel closer to home:
We will keep you posted of any others, as and when they are confirmed. If we haven't yet confirmed on in your country - please let us know who you normally buy from and we would be happy to get in touch with them and see if they are interested :-)
In the last update we said that one of the first next steps for the Maker Kits would be to get the Media Center HAT overlay in the official Raspbian kernel...well the good news is that we have already done it!
It is pretty bare bones right now as you can see, but it is a work in progress and as mentioned in the last update we have ~3 months to get the software all sorted so we are prioritising the PiJuice HATs first and foremost. It already works perfectly with framebuffer / FBTFT - so you can already map the command line or the Raspbian desktop to it very easily. The Lirc setup (for using an IR remote - if you have not head of Lirc) is working great and both IR receiver and IR blaster are performing nicely (you can use this to control any infrared device as well) and range is currently about 3 to 5 metres on the IR sender depending on the sensitivity of the device, using the on board IR receiver / transmitter. If you want to get further range - it is possible - you would just need to use an off-board IR LED / receiver.
We are going to be shortly getting in touch with the lovely folk at Pi Play / RetroPie / OSMC / LibreElec and more to try and build support in before launch. Additionally, we will be writing custom scripts for the point and shoot camera to build in some cool and useful functionality. Last but not least we are going to be adding some nice auto-config for the buttons / joystick too.
Thanks and here is to a PiJuicy 2018, Aaron and the Pi Supply team
Maker Kit update and production plan (and happy holidays!)
over 8 years ago
– Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 10:27:40 PM
Hey all,
We have some exciting news on the Maker Kits which we want to share with you. We last mentioned them in our update on the 7th October. Unfortunately, we have not heard from Harry Gee from Agilic about the Maker Kits at all since that update (as you may remember, he was supposed to be completing that part of the project). Whilst that really sucks, we made a commitment to deliver them to you, and we will not let you down.
Here is what we plan to do...
Media Center HAT
We have been working on a product for a while, that kind of got put on the back-burner for a little bit due to the issues we had with PiJuice called the "Media Center HAT". This is a board with a 2.83" touch screen, optional button / joystick inputs, onboard infrared input and output (and a remote control to go with) and a few more features including the ability to mount at a right angle.
It is a pretty cool board. Here it is in the flesh (the "ears" are removable mounting panel-mounting holes):
Media Center HAT Front
Media Center HAT Rear
Media Center HAT Right Angle Front
Media Center HAT Right Angle Rear
Media Center HAT Packaging Front
Media Center HAT Packaging Rear
Basically, we have now brought that board out of "hibernation" and are now going to be producing it with Farnell / Embest. It will be a standalone product, but it will also form the centerpiece of the Maker Kits as the display portion.
Whilst there are already other similar products on the market, this gives us a lot more control over the integration and features and hopefully should make for a better end result than using an "off the shelf" part. It is also CE and FCC tested for ultimate peace of mind.
Casing and software
Obviously the display portion of the Maker Kits is only one element of the design. Perhaps the other most important element is the casing design and the software.
We have had a consultation with our good friends at CamdenBoss (you have probably heard their name before - they have done the PiJuice battery surround and cases too!) and they are confident they can produce the cases for us for the Maker Kit projects.
Here is the first prototype of the "PocketPi" case:
PocketPi Case Side
PocketPi Case Rear
As you can see we have added some cool features like a removable kickstand and spaces for rubber feet, suction cups and other mounting methods (such as mounting on a tripod).
After coming up with this initial design, we realised we could probably do all of the three "Maker Kit" projects with a single case with some add on / removable parts. We are actively exploring this possibility and hope to have some further concepts available to show you soon showing how they could look.
In terms of software, the main things are going to be integrating with RetroPi / PiPlay and other gaming platforms on the Pi and the other main one will be writing a nice point-and-shoot camera script. Whilst these are pretty important, we recently added a software engineer to our team so are well equipped to get these done in a timely fashion. Our first priority right now is refining and debugging the PiJuice core software, but after that is complete we will move on to the Maker Kit stuff.
Timeline
Currently, we are expecting to have these Media Center HATs ready somewhere around March - the unit you see in the picture is actually one of the first samples from Farnell / Embest. We have tested them and apart from a few small issues they are working perfectly. Next step is to get the drivers in the kernel, get the boards fully into production and get the cases finalised and also into production. Hopefully this should allow us to ship around the beginning of Q2 next year (April). We will push to ship them sooner, but this seems like a realistic best guess for now.
As said previously, if you backed at a "Maker Kit" level we will still be shipping you your PiJuice HATs separately as soon as they are ready so you won't have to wait.
Hope this clarifies the situation for everyone and we are excited to finally be making progress again on the final piece of the PiJuice puzzle, so that we can bring the entire project to a close in the first half of next year.
Happy Holidays
Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, we wanted to wish you all a happy holidays and hope you have a lovely time whatever you might be doing. We are really grateful for all of your support over the last year (and before) and are extremely excited to get these out the door in 2018 and see what you all create with PiJuice - it is going to be awesome to see in the wild!
Thanks for keeping faith in us, and for supporting us through this long and sometimes arduous journey. We really appreciate it :-)
Thanks, Aaron and the PiJuice team
Addresses locked down, shipping news and GitHub updates!
over 8 years ago
– Thu, Dec 14, 2017 at 05:33:35 PM
Hi all,
Some more news for you today, let's get straight to it.
Address lock down
As we announced previously, we have now locked down shipping adresses on backerkit. If you need to change your address now please email [email protected]
We literally just got off a phone call with Farnell with regard to shipping. When we originally placed the order we were told that the shipping date for the 5k first batch would be 16th December at the very latest....obviously that is this Saturday...and there had been no signs that the shipping was imminent so we have been pushing them, and their manufacturing arm Embest, hard for updates. Unfortunately they are not very transparent with us at the best of times and tend to give half answers a lot of the time which does not make things easy. We did not communicate this 16th December date yet to you all because we have been trying to get 100% confirmation of it for the last month or so and they could not give that to us and we were obviously suspicious of that...
However, we have just been told that at a minimum, we will get 2k units in January (and yes - still a bit of a half answer as that could be Jan 1st or Jan 31st!). We obviously said that is not good enough and we really need the full 5k batch in January at the very latest, but at the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM we 100% certainly need the 3234 units we need to fulfill all of the Kickstarter and BackerKit orders. They have said that this should provisionally be OK just now on the phone.
I have pushed back and said that we not only need official written confirmation of this, but we also need to know an exact shipping date. We should hopefully hear back about that on Friday or Monday and as soon as we hear anything more I will post back here.
Needless to say - we are very annoyed and frustrated with this further delay, but right now there is not a lot we can do other than just continue to push Farnell / Embest to do better and support things in any other way that we can. We are calling / emailing them every single day, and will continue to do so.
GitHub updates
Francesco has been working hard on updating the technical guides and information and you can see some of the fruits of his labour starting to take shape on GitHub here - https://github.com/PiSupply/PiJuice
More updates soon :-)
Thanks as always, Aaron and the PiJuice team
Fully updated product description, updated compliance and battery docs
over 8 years ago
– Mon, Dec 04, 2017 at 11:36:59 PM
Hi all,
Just a quick one really...
Some of our avid backers may have already seen this (I know a few of you already have!) but we have put live a fully updated product description with a lot of technical info about chips etc that I know a lot of you have requested at various times. This is just the first of the info for the product page - a lot more technical information is in progress at GitHub and will be constantly updated too. But we thought some of you might be interested to have a quick read of this new info.
Additionally, we have done a final pass of the CE/FCC/ICES testing for PiJuice (we already knew it would pass, due to previous tests, but wanted to make 100% sure we were safe and compliant so have done it again on the production boards). You can see all the updated testing documents and all of the updated Declaration of Conformities over on GitHub here. Let us know if you have any questions surrounding those...we want to make sure that PiJuice is the absolute best solution for portable Raspberry Pi power - for industry, for schools, for hackers, for makers - so we want to make sure it is also 100% compliant, easy to ship and safe...this was our commitment in the campaign and we are glad to be delivering on that promise.
