Electronic – Is it possible to combine multiple 5V USB batteries to power a Raspberry Pi for a long period of time (months)

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I need suggestions or help thinking this problem through. I want to battery power a Raspberry Pi with multiple USB battery packs (for a remote sensing application) with no need to do anything manually. Solar re-charging of one battery is not really an option. I am talking about off-the shelf USB batteries sold by companies such as Anker.

Most USB batteries do not allow simultaneous charging while using a battery, so daisy-chaining multiple USB batteries (with one plugged into the RPi's USB) is tempting, but probably out.

I am wondering if I need to design a charge controller circuit that detects when a given battery is low, then switches instantaneously. Does this sound like my best bet? Is there an off-the shelf circuit or reference design that I should look into for this?

Another idea I had is maybe to connect all the batteries in series. This would of course produce a higher voltage than the original 5V. I could use a step-down buck converter to supply the 5V to the raspberry Pi.

Any ideas or strategies are welcome! Thanks for your help!

Best Answer

A Raspberry Pi model B draws about 1.21W with nothing plugged into the USB ports.

So (say) 3 months is about 2200 hours, so you're talking about 2.6kWh if you want to power it continuously.

A full-size laptop Li-ion battery pack might hold 48 to 80Wh, so you'd need at least 33 to 54 of them.

A 76 lb deep cycle battery might hold 1.2 or 1.3kWh so you might only need a couple of them.

A 5.2Ah USB battery pack might supply 25Wh so you'd need almost 100 of them.

Doesn't sound very practical at all, I'm afraid.

A properly designed low-power microcontroller device can run for several years on a small button cell, waking up briefly and doing things once in a while.