Today we are very proud to announce our new product: Witty Pi 4!
This is the 4th generation of Witty Pi. Comparing with Witty Pi 3, it has same shape factor and same connector locations, and have some interesting new features.
What’s New?
Witty Pi 4 uses a new structure to organise its hardware resources. Instead of exposing the realtime clock and temperature sensor directly to Raspberry Pi, it uses micro-controller (MCU) to emulate one I2C device (with address 0x08), and only exposes this I2C device to Raspberry Pi. On the other hand, it implement its internal I2C bus and connect the realtime clock and temperature sensor to that internal I2C bus.
Witty Pi’s firmware also maps all I2C registers in realtime clock and temperature sensor into its own I2C device, so you can access all I2C registers in realtime clock and temperature sensor via single I2C device.
Because the address of this single I2C device is also configurable, you can always avoid the I2C address conflicting.
A new feature of Witty Pi 4 is to turn your Raspberry Pi into a temperature controlled device. You can put it into sleep when temperature is rather high, or the other way around.
In Witty Pi 3, you cannot specify the “seconds” in scheduled shutdown time, and that was due to the limitation from the realtime clock hardware. In Witty Pi 4, the alarms for startup and shutdown are implemented by the firmware, and hence you can specify the “seconds” in both scheduled times.
There are other differences between Witty Pi 3 and 4, and you can find a chapter about how to migrate from Witty Pi 3 to Witty Pi 4 in the user manual (chapter 13).
How about Witty Pi 3?
Witty Pi 3 is discontinued. We understand it is not good for ongoing projects who use Witty Pi 3, and we wanted to continue producing Witty Pi 3 for a while. Unfortunately due to the shortage of DS3231SN chip, we can not do so and have to discontinue Witty Pi 3.
We will do our best to help our customers to migrate from Witty Pi 3 to Witty Pi 4.
Price and Where to Buy?
Witty Pi 4’s retail price is 25.00 EUR (about 21.48GBP / 29.80USD / 36.77CAD), and you can order it here.
You may be able to order them from our distributors soon.
