Introduction: Make an Alternate Raspberry Pi Power Cable
I saw another instructable on here a while ago about soldering a power cable directly to the board and i liked the idea of not using one of our micro usb cables for a permanent power solution. I found the gpio pinout online and decided to try to make another power cable but using parts i have all over the place. I ended up making two cables, a short one and a long one and it works great. Then to connect to the pins i modified a cd audio cable from a really old pc. you may not have one of these but i also found that you can connect an ide ribbon cable to the pins and that works as well. I read that this bypasses the fuse that protects the board from voltage spikes but im not worried about that. It works and im happy with it.
3 Comments
9 years ago on Introduction
Hi,
Nice info, this was the biggest deal in the comments with the guy who soldered his RPi. Your solution has the problem it covers a +5V pin and the UART's TXD, which is a very convenient way to "talk" with Arduinos (besides the I2C, SPI is pretty unusable)
The RPi drains 700mA maximum, which is not going to be enough if I put a 3.5" SATA and a few toys, do you know how to power the other toys externally so I'm not burning the RPi with my 2A power adapter (the RPi will definitely try to sink that much power... and will just burn on the way :-( )
Cheers!
Reply 9 years ago
so it depends on how big you want to make this contraption but if you were going to connect 3.5" drives you should consider the little single molex power supply kits that make bate drives USB or you could just go up to the full atx power supply and power the whole device off of that. atx power supplies are all over the place. most of us have a few in closets. they have all the right voltages that a tinkerer would need especially for a RPI project. that's what I would do. really you could just gut an old computer but leave the power supply and mount your RPI in the case and put your drives in the proper spots. you could even use the power switch to turn on the device if you wanted to. let us know what you end up doing. its good for the community to see each others work.
9 years ago on Introduction
Thanks for sharing this!