Quad Power Management Board Pure Python Drivers Released for Raspberry Pi

August 12, 2015 Quad Power Management I2C Board, Raspberry Pi, Robots, Software, SunRover, SwitchDoc Products

Quad Power Management Board Pure Python Drivers Released for Raspberry PiIMG_5048

 

The Pure Python Raspberry Pi driver software for the new product from SwitchDoc Labs, the Quad Power Management Board, has been released.  This device just came out of a successful (146% funded) Kickstarter campaign.

The Quad Power Management Board

he Quad Power Management Board (QPM) is a fabulous addition to our product line.  We have needed one of these for a long time.  Back when we were building Project Curacao, we were continually needing relays (mostly latching relays) to switch power on and off to computers and devices, to switch from solar to wind and a variety of other chores.  What a pain!  Now we have developed and designed a Quad Power Management board incorporating I2C controlled 4 Independent Solid State Relays each with LEDs to show what is going on with the board.  Each solid state relay is able to switch 20V and 2.3A.   You can switch DC signals and analog signals (with proper conditioning – you need to add a DC Offset for analog signals).
This board is magic  for building power systems. There are 4 Additional GPIOs provided on the board (thanks to the SX1502) that can be used as GPIOs, interrupts or a programmable logic gate as above.   Software drivers for Arduino and Raspberry Pi Included!
We are using this board extensively in our new  SunRover semi-autonomous robot design.   You will be seeing a series of articles on this robot in Raspberry Pi Geek magazine starting in the August issue.  The robot uses a total of 10 Quad Power Management boards to stack/unstack all the batteries and to switch the solar panels from one computer to another.
And they are all controlled by an I2C bus!  No more massive use of GPIO pins for latching relays and other devices.

Here is the block diagram for the board:figure5

features:

  • I2C controlled
  • 4 Independent Solid State Relays each with LEDs
  • Each is able to switch 20V and 2.3A
  • 4 Additional GPIOs
  • Software drivers for Arduino and Raspberry Pi Included!

 

Raspberry Pi Pure Python Drivers

Raspberry Pi Pure Python Software Drivers are available here at https://github.com/switchdoclabs/SDL_Pi_QPM

Hooking up the Quad Power Management Board to the Raspberry Pi

Signal Name

Raspberry Pi A/B/A+/B+/Pi 2

Quad Power Management Board

Power

3.3V (GPIO/1)

VDDM (JP2/1)

GND

GND (GPIO/6)

GND (JP2/2)

SCL

I2C1_SCL (GPIO/5)

SCL (JP2/3)

SDA

I2C1_SDA (GPIO/3)

SDA (JP2/4)

Remember to connect the pins on JP1 to VDDM!

Running the Test Software

Here is an example of the using the Python drivers for the QPM board on the Raspberry Pi.



The first test on the Raspberry Pi should always be “i2cdetect -y 1” which should show you the QPM Board at the default address of 0x21.


Running the test gives these results from the Quad Power Management I2C  board  on the Raspberry Pi:


Test SDL_Pi_QPM Version 1.0 - SwitchDoc Labs
Sample uses 0x21 I2C Address
Cycles through all the four loadswitches Program Started at:2015-08-04 23:51:44
-----------------
('------>>>> Initial GPIO Value =', 0) ----------------
Turn on LSW0
Turn on LSW1
Turn on LSW2
Turn on LSW3
---------------- 
Turn on LSW0 
Turn on LSW1 
Turn on LSW2 
Turn on LSW3 
---------------- 
Turn on LSW0 
Turn on LSW1 
Turn on LSW2 
Turn on LSW3 
----------------
...