Recently I purchased a portable phone battery on clearance. I want to use it to modify my defunct Pokemon Go Gotcha band, which no longer holds a charge, to run off the battery pack. I realized that a battery pack could also be useful for powering other small electronics, such as the Raspberry Pi.
The problem is, I wanted to get an idea of how long the battery would last powering the Raspberry Pi. Figuring this out isn’t really all that hard. The tricky part is that I can’t stand over the Pi and watch it until it dies.
So instead I set up a simple cronjob task to do the job for me. I had a spare SD card, so I threw a basic fresh install of Raspbian on the card. I configured SSH and WiFi, then did a quick run of “crontab -e”, then droped the following at the end.
*/5 * * * * date >> /home/pi/date.txtSimple.
Every 5 minutes, the Pi will now write the Date and Time to the file “date.txt”. It will do this until it can’t which would be after the battery dies, killing the Pi.
After charging the battery pack over night, I stuck the Pi on it and left it.
After checking back periodically, when I found the Pi was dead, I plugged it into a regular power source to retrieve the data. The result were both better than I had hoped, and not as great as I had hoped. The Pi started spitting out Time Stamps again after I plugged it back in, so I ended up having to skim through the file to find the time gap. I went ahead and truncated the data down to hour stamps until I came across the time jump from when the Pi had died and when I had plugged it back in.
So it turns out that the Battery pack will drive power for the Pi for around 12 hours. I also want to test this under a bit of a load and test how long it will power an Arduino writing to a remote database.