Hey everyone,
I have a power meter connected to my Raspberry Pi and when I connected the Blinkt! Module, I realized that it is consuming around 0.4W of power without any of the LEDs lighting up. Indeed after some time, the module gets warm as well. I measured with an amp meter and it draws something like 40 mA when turned “off” Is this amount of power consumption when turned “off” normal for the Blinkt! module? When running a Raspberry Pi 24/7 to do some notifications, this is wasting quite a bit of energy and I’m not sure if this will damage the module, given that it is warming up while being “off”.
If your not already try doing a
blinkt.clear()
blinkt.show()
On my 4B and earlier Pi’s what ever LED’s are lit when I shutdown stay lit until I unplug the power supply.
To get around this I do a clear and show to blank the Blinkt before doing the shutdown.
Same thing happens with my LED Shim and Unicorn Hat HD. Those “smart” LED’s remember there last state and stay lit until told otherwise.
The power consumption is already happening when no LEDs are lighting up, as soon as I’m starting the Raspberry Pi. While calling clear() and show() turns all LEDs off, there is some quite significant background energy consumption which keeps the Blinkt module warm to the touch. I’m just wondering if this is due to the design of the board or some defect?
Ok, was worth a mention. My Blinkt is currently plugged into my Pi400. The Pi400 removes power from the GPIO on shutdown so I’d have to move it to another Pi.
I have a Pi Zero on a Hat Hacker I’m going to be tinkering with today or tomorrow. I’ll set mine up on that and see what happens.
I have no way to check current draw, but I’m not noticing it getting warm. I haven’t installed any software yet, just checking it while I’m doing other stuff. Just did a fresh install and ran update upgrade, then did my usual tweaks.
I will run the installer in a bit and run one of the examples to make sure its working etc.
Even with some LED’s lit up it’s not getting hot. Not that I can feel with my finger tips.
Now that I have the software installed its randomly lighting up some of the LED’s on boot up so I’ve unplugged it. Not sure what’s going on there as I haven’t seen that happen before?
The random lights on bootup is afaik becaues some of the GPIO pins during startup put out signals and therefore, the lights are triggered.
I’ve had this for a while now, and used it on several different Pi’s. It’s the first time its ever lit up like that on its own. I have my breakout garden on that Pi with a RTC and display. They use i2c and SPI though, not any of the pins the Blinkt uses. I don’t have plans to use it on that Pi, and it doesn’t do it on my Pi400 so it’s not a big deal, just weird?
Blinkt! at Raspberry Pi GPIO Pinout
Ok I checked again and apparently, it’s only some ports that send out signals on startup. raspbian - GPIO keeps flickering on start/restart, how to stop it? - Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange
At least my Blinkt module is not flickering on startup. However the temperature is something like 32°C when all lights are off so there is definetely some current running.