GeeekPiUPS HAT for Raspberry Pi Pico/Pico W, Uninterruptible Power Supply with 18650 Lithium Battery Charger and Power Management Expansion Board

I bought this to see if my home made battery system would work. I have taken 8 cells of 18650@ 3500mAh in series to give 28,000 mAh of current at 3.7 volts. Everything this protected as a professional pack would be. I soldered the ends of the pack to the appropriate sides of this device. I have many power hungry battery powered projects and the pin layout for this hat seemed good. Size is decent. I’m most disappointed it only came with MicroPython code. I know that’s the dominant language because it requires the least knowledge and lines of code to build something. I don’t use MP. I only code in c/c++ using the Pico SDk only. I would raise my star rating if you included sample c code (not Arduino), pure c. Something with visual studio code for example.I can read the python code and see what it’s doing and code it myself but it would be cool if you just provided code for all the variants the pico supports. There are plenty of us c/c++ coders that like to be in full control of the MCU vs Micropython’s “here I’ll do everything for you just type a few lines”. Not everyone writes in a way where they want to be spoon fed everything. MP is great and I have nothing against it but don’t assume that’s the only language. Anyways enough ranting that no cares about. So far it’s doing its job keeping my power hungry projects running for a long time due to my battery packs. Will buy more and even give it a higher rating if Geekworm takes the time to read this (ha! Yeah right) and actually included example code for all supported languages. It’s not like it’s a hard thing to code. Oh well. I’ll probably just reverse engineer this product and make my own version. Component labeling is good and the chips I can use methods to find how what they are and how they are being used! Electronics are fun!

I got this UPS today and here is what happened.First, my button-top 18650 barely fits, this should be use with a flat 18650.Second, I plugged in a Pico and my USB cable into the UPS board and it powered it up, but the battery's charge was less than 100% so the "100" LED was flashing, BUT the CHG LED was not on. I checked on this a while later and the 100 LED was off completely and the CHG and STBY LEDs were also off. Seems like it is not charging and not using 100% of the battery. No software on the PICO.Third, not too surprising, but the USB plugged into the UPS board does not connect to the Pico, so Thonny does not see the Pico. Several other comments indicate that if you plug a USB cable into the Pico with this UPS board in place, you fry the UPS board "in a puff of smoke". This is fairly useless as I will not unplug the Pico from the UPS socket every time I need to update the software.So far, this UPS is useless. I found nothing in the meager documentation that talks specifically about powering the UPS and providing a USB connection to the Pico. This is a severe flaw in the design. I consider the LEDs behavior contrary to the documentation, hence the board is defective and will be returned.

I feel like this product is trying to cut a lot of corners. The obvious thing that has been mentioned before is that there are no mounting holes making it harder to integrate into projects. This product also has very limited documentation relative to the amount of weird behaviors that should be documented.For some reason, this board is always powered. Even when the switch is off, it is draining your battery and providing about 1V of power to your Pico. This doesn't seem to cause any issues other than being wasteful. To their credit this behavior was documented.The bigger issue that I found was that there doesn't seem to be a protection diode preventing the board from being back powered from the Pico. If you plug in the Pico to your computer while connected to this UPS with a low battery, the UPS will burn out. There will be a small puff of smoke and this board becomes unusable. This behavior definitely was not documented.TLDR; I would not recommend buying this product. It was more frustrating that beneficial to use.

As other reviews state: Do not plug in directly to the PICO unless you'd like to let the smoke out of this board. Makes this very difficult to use unless you already have your PICO loaded up and never intend on changing any of the code it contains.

Se supone que es un ups pero cuando se conecta la bateria y la energia por el puerto usb el dispositivo se daña

As someone else pointed out, the code example doesn't work. Wish I could find a solution, but even emailing the creator of the device was fruitless. It will run a pico on battery, but I have way to monitor the state of charge.

The good:This was one of the less expensive UPS hats for the Pico (I'm running the Pico W).It is well made and plugs into the Pico easily.The bad:Documentation is not great, and the code on the wiki page didn't work for me when I copy-pasta'ed it into Thonny.The wiki example also details 3 values returned when you query the unit, but it actually returns 4 values (and extra value added in the middle).It would have been more user friendly if Pico orientation was silk screened onto the unit.Through holes for mounting in a case would have been nice.It does what it needs to do, and I have not had any issues with it in the week or so I have been using it. For this particular project I wanted to measure when power was shut off to a device, and I can measure the voltage input to accomplish this and notify me when there is a power loss to an outlet.