Troubleshooting • Re: Powering multiple raspberry pis

I like that industrial look power supply its cool. At the recommended 80% capacity we have 240w / 27w ~= 8 raspberry pis. Not bad. I was thinking to wire together a bunch of bare-wire terminated USB C plugs.

Only problem, https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentati ... berry-pi-5 says:

For users who wish to drive high-power peripherals like hard drives and SSDs, while retaining margin for peak workloads, a USB-PD-enabled power supply capable of supplying 5A at +5V (25W) should be used. If the Raspberry Pi 5 firmware detects a supported 5A-capable supply, it increases the USB current limit for peripherals to 1.6A, providing 5W of extra power for downstream USB devices, and 5W of extra onboard power budget.

Of course I want to plugin a bunch of random stuff

I think people were powering pis through the GPIO at one point as well but it wasnt ever recommended and its not on the page.

One thing does jump out at me though:

If you are using a third-party USB-PD-capable multi-port power supply, plugging an additional device into the supply as well as your Raspberry Pi will cause a renegotiation between the supply and the Raspberry Pi. This will happen seamlessly if the Raspberry Pi is powered, but if the Raspberry Pi is plugged in and powered down, this renegotiation may cause the Raspberry Pi to boot.

Maybe I'm having some variant of this where instead of booting, my other pi is powering off or crashing. This is the little USB charger I'm using - its been rock solid until I started plugging/unplugging while trying to tidy up some wires: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006105371654.html - 240W Desktop GaN Charger.

I have a pi 5 arriving in the next few days so I'll see what happens when I plug that in as well.

Thanks for the advices

Statistics: Posted by _geoff — Wed Feb 14, 2024 12:29 pm

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