Automating Power-UP and Power-Down

As part of our FAQ we answered a question about using the Red Reactor with a real time clock so you can completely shut down the Raspberry Pi system and then use a timed alarm to power everything back up again.

Not all projects need this feature of course, but if you’re building something that only needs to wake up say once an hour, or once per day, then by shutting down completely, and with the fact that the Red Reactor only consumes a few micro-amps when OFF, you could potentially get many months of battery life for your monitoring applications.

Because our board provides easy access to the button interface, we decided to make a short video to show you how to make that work, which you can see on our channel at https://youtu.be/NvDd5q-TUnc . In this setup we used the DS3132 RTC module, but you’ll need to remove the pull-up resistors for the I2C interface as these are already on the Red Reactor. There is of course no need to put a coin battery in as continuous power also comes from the Red Reactor.

It is worth mentioning that if you don’t power the system OFF before an alarm, your software will receive the alarm interrupt in the same way as our example button interface software shows. So you can use the same setup for projects that stay active and need a timed action interrupt, for example to shut everything down after midnight. The second alarm register of the DS3132 device could wake it all up again too!

We hope you’ll find the video interesting!