djbriane's mintyPi's with 500c and Safe Shutdown

[djbriane]

Wanted to show off my two mintyPi builds - Peppermint and Spearmint. I had a few challenges along the way but in the end they turned out great and I think I love them more than my GBZ!

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In one of my builds I decided to use the PowerBoost 500c instead of the microLiPo, initially because the micro USB socket kept getting pushed into the case as I plugged it in to charge. However, I discovered that I could wire the LBO (low battery) pin on the 500c to an unused GPIO pin to safely shutdown the Pi when the battery is out of juice. Then I combined this with HoolyHoo's library for showing an indicator on the screen so I get a little warning before the Pi shuts itself down (about 2 minutes seems to be the sweet spot).

Here's a pic of the insides with the 500c in place (yes, I had to jumper one of the pins on the Pi as I couldn't get a reliable connection for ground ):

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This is the wiring I used to connect everything up:

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Here's the code I'm using in case anyone wants to try the same (I forked the Pimoroni library as I liked how cleanly it installs):
https://github.com/djbriane/clean-shutdown

[Lphillimore]

Awesome builds!

Great work on that safe shutdown,too. Nicely done!

[wermy]

NICE! Thanks for sharing - I've wondered about using the low battery LED pads on a powerboost for safe shutdown.

[rodocop]

Thanks for sharing! Once I open my first one up to add the speaker I will add in the low battery warning like you mentioned.

[djbriane]

Made a short video showing the shutdown in action:

[PocketSand]

Nice, thanks for sharing the vid!

[rodocop]

Made a short video showing the shutdown in action:

So im in the process of installing your script and have an issue, I see in the video you have a battery icon, I do not see that after installation, please see the image for what I see when I try to install, is this normal? ( I ran the setup.sh again after I installed so I could copy the text again). Other than waiting till the battery dies, is there a way to test if it is working? Do i need to install HoolyHoo's battery monitor script separately?

I have placed the clean-shutdown-master folder into /home/pi/RetroPie/ directory, it would not let me copy it to /boot or /root

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oops, cut one line off in the image, after the installing indicator it shows:
mkdir: cannot creat directory '/usr/local/share/icons': File exists

[Camble]

These look awesome! I must have been living under a rock lately. Not sure if you're too bothered, but you might want to measure the voltage at the LBO pin when charging. With the PowerBoost 1000C, the voltage can be as high as 5v. At the very least, you'd want to have a 10K resistor in there, but there's still a risk of damaging the GPIO pin. As well as the resistor, you can connect a diode from the GPIO pin to the 5v supply to clamp the voltage to a tolerable level.