Posts by hcunningham

Re: Charging

Thanks for the input...

I answered most of these points over on the kickstarter... See update 2

Re. rocket science I actually prefer rocket salad :-)

Have a good one

H

Re: If a battery fails when there is no-one to see it ...

hi,

The LEDs are good for applications whenever you can see the thing (e.g. under the lid of a Pibow case), and as someone else mentionned they take very little power.

We do have an ADC measuring charge already :-) and we pass that data to the Pi via a 3-bit value on GPIO. This is enough for basic operation, but as we add more features it gets a little tight, and we also want to allow configuration on the Pi itself -- so we need to pass data back to the board. Your suggestion of I2C looks like the best option for this -- thanks for the confirmation.

Re. other LiPos and so on, yes, there are lots -- none that I know of tell the Pi when the battery is low and needs to shut down, but no doubt they'll come :-)

Thanks for your interest!

h

Re: Where's the incentive @John Bailey

hi folks

I'm not sure I follow all the comments about pricing, but I'll try and give some background in case that helps...

We're building a little gizmo that (we hope) does something useful, and via Kickstarter you can get it cheaper and earlier than the retail version (and participate in its development). There is little or no profit involved -- we're looking for backers so that we can order in bulk (components get cheaper), get resources for comprehensive final testing, and get feedback for the design and so on.

There's a markup in the price on Kickstarter to cover the site fees and payment transaction charges, but this markup is much lower than a typical retail markup, which can be as high as 50%. So the early bird price will be around a third cheaper than retail, and the non-early bird prices will still be cheaper than the eventual high street price.

No big mystery, I think.

HTH, best

Hamish Cunningham

http://pi.gate.ac.uk/