Residing out of Kiev, Ukraine, maker and developer Dmytro Panin has develop into greater than artful with the Raspberry Pi. Panin has created fairly a number of tasks which have helped make his and the lives of different’s simpler whereas residing in a interval of accelerating ranges of uncertainty. In the present day we’ve bought one other intelligent creation of his to share that makes use of a Pico to log and assist predict rolling energy blackouts.
Panin explains that rolling blackouts have been occurring for a number of weeks now in Ukraine as a part of an effort to assist stabilize the facility grid. He needed to discover a option to decide how lengthy energy has been out for when returning house which might additionally assist him decide when the following blackout could be. To make issues simpler, he determined to make use of a Raspberry Pi Pico to log the occasions.
It retains observe of when the blackouts begin by logging an entry on an e-paper show which ensures knowledge might be seen whether or not or not the facility is presently on. It additionally logs when the blackout has ended so you’ll be able to see the period of the facility outage. You may see the previous few blackouts on the log, not simply the newest entry to get an thought of what the schedule has been like.
The {hardware} is housed within a customized, 3D-printed shell and features a Raspberry Pi Pico, a Waveshare e-paper show made only for the Pico and a Precision RTX module (DS3231) to assist precisely observe time for the challenge. Should you needed to recreate this challenge, you possibly can use a unique show however we extremely suggest implementing an e-paper panel of some kind to make sure the info is accessible the occasion of an influence outage.
The code for the challenge was written by Panin and written in MicroPython model 1.19.1. As with most of his different tasks, this one is totally open supply so anybody all in favour of creating it at house can get a more in-depth take a look at the supply code over at GitHub.
If you wish to recreate this Raspberry Pi challenge or simply see the way it works, try the official challenge web page over at GitHub and take a look at the video of it in motion over at Twitter. Make sure to observe Panin for extra creations and future Pi tasks.