It has been a while since our previous post. We were not sleeping, instead we were working hard on new products. Today we are glad to announce that one of our new products: Witty Pi is coming soon!
What is Witty Pi?
It is tiny PCB that could be mounted on your Raspberry Pi (model A+, B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 supported). With Witty Pi, your Raspberry Pi has realtime clock (RTC) and power management on board, and you get some amazing new features:
- You can properly turn on/off Raspberry Pi with single tap on the switch.
- Raspberry Pi and all its USB peripherals get fully power cut after shutdown.
- Raspberry Pi knows the correct time, even without accessing the Internet.
- You can schedule the startup/shutdown of your Raspberry Pi.
Why we need Witty Pi?
Raspberry Pi uses micro SD card as its “hard-drive”, and it writes date to it from time to time. If you suddenly cut Raspberry Pi’s power without halting all processes in the system, the micro SD card may lose power during the date writing, and has the chance to be damaged.
Witty Pi adds a power switch for Raspberry Pi, and you can turn on/off the Pi properly, without worrying about the micro SD card. Witty Pi’s daemon process will halt all processes for you, before really cut off the power. What’s more, if you shutdown your Pi with “sudo shutdown -h now” command, or you choose “Shutdown” in the desktop environment, Witty Pi will detect that and fully cut off your Pi’s power after a few seconds. It is true that Raspberry Pi doesn’t consume much power after shutdown, but there are still some. If you have some USB peripherals connected on your Pi, they will also consume power even you shutdown your Pi. With the help from Witty Pi, your Pi’s power can be fully cut off and all its USB peripherals will not consume power anymore. Cool, isn’t it?
The ability to schedule shutdown and startup are also very useful. You don’t have to wait til midnight to shutdown your Pi, or wake up very early to turn on your Pi 🙂
Also don’t forget Witty Pi has RTC on board, it can remember the correct time for your Raspberry Pi. Even without the Internet access, your Pi will know the correct time, because Witty Pi will synchronize the time to your Pi’s system.
When and How Much?
The retail price for Witty Pi will be 380 CZK (about 15 USD, or 13.8 EUR, or 10 GBP). Besides the Witty Pi board, the package also includes a CR2032 button battery, 4 cooper standoffs and 8 cooper screws that can help you to fix your Witty Pi with Raspberry Pi.
The exact date to ship the first batch of Witty Pi is not decided yet, but the reservation process will be opened on our website very soon. Please keep an eye on our website, or follow us on Tweeter, Facebook or Google+ if you are interested.
Update on 2015-04-18:
Here is a video to introduce Witty Pi’s cool features:
Here is the user manual of Witty Pi (in PDF format): http://www.uugear.com/doc/WittyPi_UserManual.pdf
Update on 2015-05-01:
The reservation of Witty Pi is now opened: http://www.uugear.com/product/witty-pi-realtime-clock-and-power-management-for-raspberry-pi/