If you have been using this type of PSU for some time then why are you asking about power supplies?Thank you to all who responded.
Re the AliExpress and Farnell links, I have been using PSUs of that type for some time. They are fine with my older Pis but I began to hit problems with the Pi4 and Pi5 due to the way that USB-C is controlled. You need to have a power supply that can communicate through the USB connector to prevent the Pi from defaulting to 3A. This is defined in the USB-C standard and covered in this post: https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=378045
If you connect the PSU to the 5V and GND pins on the GPIO header you don't need to care about the USB-C plug.
The 3A "issue" only applies to Pi 5, and can be turned off in software.
Are you sure it's current? It could be voltage drop. Are your supply wires too thin? Is your PSU poorly designed?As pointed out in that post, most of the time you can get away with 3A but my Pi seems to think otherwise and complains about my power supply, hence the motivation for my question.
PoE is specified to run up to 100m. The wattage is limited depending on the class of PoE supply. PoE+, for example, will deliver 25.5W.Power over Ethernet was one suggestion in your responses - I have not tried it but the voltage drop is likely to make it infeasible. The gate post is 90 metres from the house.
Yes. Connect your buck converter output (5.1V) to the 5V pins on the GPIO header, and set usb_max_current_enable (if you are using a Pi 5).OK, so what am I trying to do? We have a motorised gate that is controlled by a FAAC controller, so that mains is already at the gate and, by chance, so is an ethernet connection because the previous owners received their internet connection there. When we moved here there was a video phone at the gate that rang inside the house but that is pretty useless when we are in the garden and the elements and the ants killed it completely so I thought I'd replace it with something that will call me on my phone. FAAC produce a solution but it costs €1,500 and it seemed like a good challenge to do it with a Pi instead. This also means that I can add in other features, such as detecting whether the gates are in the position that the controller thinks they are - strong winds can cause the gates to stop because they can trigger the safety mechanism. Talking to the gate controller is trivial and could be done with an arduino or similar but I am thinking of running Telegram on the Pi so that I can talk to whoever is at the gate and decide what action to take.
Returning to the likes of the Meantime et al types of PSU, I have experimented with connecting these through a buck converter, which has the advantage of a USB output. This has enabled me to power a Pi and a screen from a 12V power supply going through a couple of buck converters but I would need better bucks to be USB-C compliant. Any suggestions?
https://suptronics.com/Raspberrypi/Stor ... tware.html
Statistics: Posted by ame — Tue Apr 22, 2025 7:35 pm