By constructing two of these circuits allowed me to monitor both LED’s on the power-board. The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that is perfect for the tedious task of methodically capturing “blinks” and writing the hourly total to a data store (or streaming to an MQTT broker).
A powerful feature of the Raspberry Pi is the row of GPIO (general-purpose input/output) pins along the top edge of the board. This is an interface between the physical world of lights and wires and the software world of zero’s and one’s
Python is awesome for event driven coding — allowing code to respond to electrical pulses on the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. A function is written to handle the a light pulse (ie., increase a counter) and this function is attached to an event handler for the appropriate GPIO pin.
Running this code for 3 months allowed me to start understanding the rate of power usage each hour. The graph below is daily power consumption trends using a month of data. The horizontal axis is 24 hours, with midnight on the left to 11pm on the right. Minimum consumption is shown in blue, average consumption in orange and maximum consumption in white.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: The latest on Raspberry Pi RP2350-E9, Bluetooth 6, 4,000 Stars and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!