MakerHawk Raspberry Pi UPS Power Supply Uninterruptible UPS HAT 18 650 Battery Charger Power Bank Power Management Expansion Board 5V for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B / 3B + / 3B (Not include battery)

I put this into service for my 2GB RPi4 running Home Assistant in March 2021. Since then it's been rock solid, weathering multiple power outages and device relocations. Moving to an 8GB RPi4 now that they're in stock (thanks jeffgeerling dot com from rpilocator dot com), but also picked up a RPi5 and tested it first. Worked perfectly, just like on the 4.What it does well: * Gives you a UPS on your Pi. Easy to connect, needs M2.5 screws/standoffs. * Keeps pi running whether power is connected or not. Seems to last a long time, did not test. * Gives you an easy power button.What it could use: * A way to monitor usage through the Pi OS / Linux. * A mounting plate with the pressure springs or a wire, the POGO pins are awesome but no case. * A case for it w/the Pi. I really like the Orange Pi all metal cases. * It could be cheaper. I'd buy 10 of these if they were < $15.

That product illustration where they connected USB-C on the battery controller to USB-A port on Raspberry seemed weird to me until I figured out why they did so.Raspberry PI 4 complaints about low voltage unless you do as instructed.RTFM, indeed.I've got two of these devices and will not hesitate to recommend them.

If you leave this "off" for an extended time (weeks), it discharges the battery completely. Then it automatically turns on the Raspberry Pi while it attempts to charge, but then turns it off again -- repeatedly.Since it's a push button on-off switch, there is no way to lock the Pi off while it attempts to charge

As others have reported, the device occasionally decides it wants to completely drain the batteries and not allow charging, which shuts down the Pi. This is the opposite of 'uninterruptible'. I was happy with the length of time it could keep the Pi going, over 5 hours after using up half charge.The Python code they recommend for checking battery level is an old, unsupported Adafruit library so there isn't a straightforward way to integrate things in Python.

I really wanted to like this UPS unit... First notable problem is the software gives you no control over how the batteries are charged. You can write any values you want to the unit, it makes no difference. The unit never stops charging the batteries on a continuous basis as long as power is supplied to the unit. Second problem, the unit has never provided steady 5 volts to the outputs, despite input voltage being around 5.25v from a Raspberry Pi power supply. Output voltage from the UPS has always varied between 4.5 to 4.9 volts, and my Pi 3 B+ won't run stably anymore due to this. I've been using this UPS unit for a little over 3 months with a pair of Sanyo 2500mAh batteries that are known to be good (and do in fact keep the Pi powered without AC mains for well over an hour in this UPS unit), and while in the beginning everything worked well and stable enough, in the last two weeks, the Pi has been rebooting itself more and more frequently to the point where the Pi isn't staying up for more than 6 hours at a time, pointing to a deteriorating UPS output power supply output. Load has not changed in the time the UPS has been in use, it's just the Pi and an MCP3008 with four TMP36 temperature sensors, so I cannot reasonably believe the issue is my loading of the UPS. I wanted to like it, but it looks like unless I can figure out how to raise the UPS unit's output voltage to a reliable level, I will not be using this anymore. For the price of this thing, I expected far better.