Question Raspberry Pi 5 battery

[Jkeefe56]

Sorry for asking but I’ve read the battery guide several times and it’s still not clicking…

I want to build a portable raspberry pi 5, which prefers 5.1v at up to 5amps (3amps will work but since I will be doing a lot of emulating I don’t want to run into low power issues).

To keep it simple I was going to wire up 6 1850 batteries 2s3p or maybe start with 2s2p and see if that lasted > 2 hours. Using a buck converter to get from 7.4 to 5v. Using batteries with a C rating of at least two most likely.

To make it even simpler, I could concede to make the batteries easily removable and charge them with a wall charger which would be fine.

Where I’m stuck at this moment is I can’t find a buck converter that will put out 5amps. Or, I can, but they want a minimum 9v input which would mean 3s batteries. Doesn’t that like we’d be wasting a lot of energy?

There are rpi hats that will do this sort of thing but they seem overly expensive and don’t have a portable friendly formfactor.

If anyone who understands this better than me could throw me some advice I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Jkeefe56]

Sorry put this in the wrong section and can’t figure out how to delete it.

 

[Jonny]

Don't worry too much about the full 5A output for your PI, the reason its spec'd that high is to have overhead for peripherals. just the pi running on its own shouldnt draw much more than 10W at a time. (5V2A)

Make sure to double check how much power the rest of your peripherals are using (screen, speakers, losses to heat, etc.) to remain within the spec of your regulator, but you should be okay with a 3-4A regulator depending on your situation.

It might be cheating a little bit but you could look for power banks that have higher output capacity through USB, and that could save you the trouble of finding battery charge/protection circuitry so its all integrated on one board.

 

[Jkeefe56]

Don't worry too much about the full 5A output for your PI, the reason its spec'd that high is to have overhead for peripherals. just the pi running on its own shouldnt draw much more than 10W at a time. (5V2A)

Make sure to double check how much power the rest of your peripherals are using (screen, speakers, losses to heat, etc.) to remain within the spec of your regulator, but you should be okay with a 3-4A regulator depending on your situation.

It might be cheating a little bit but you could look for power banks that have higher output capacity through USB, and that could save you the trouble of finding battery charge/protection circuitry so its all integrated on one board.

Thanks. My portable 3B used a power bank, but I can’t find one that does 5a. I guess you’re right though and maybe I can get away with 4amp and move on. As long as I can keep my peripherals under (iirc) 600 mah.

 

[StonedEdge]

I use a 5V/3.5A boost converter (with a 1s2p setup) on my builds and I've never once had the system shut off due to overdraw.

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tps61235p.pdf?ts=1733277095192&ref_url=https%253A%252F%252Fwww.google.com%252F

 

[Stitches]

Sorry put this in the wrong section and can’t figure out how to delete it.

Moved thread to the correct section for you