UUGear's Witty Pi 5 HAT+ Offers Time, Temp, and Voltage-Based Power Management for Any Raspberry Pi

Embedded and hobbyist electronics specialist UUGear has launched a new option for powering your Raspberry Pi single-board computer: the Witty Pi 5 HAT+, with integrated real-time clock and power control functionality.

"Witty Pi is an add-on board for Raspberry Pi that brings real-time clock (RTC) and power management functionalities to your Raspberry Pi," UUGear explains of its latest hardware design, brought to our attention by CNX Software. "It can define the on/off sequence of your Raspberry Pi, perform power on/off actions based on temperature or voltage thresholds, and significantly reduce overall energy consumption."

Despite its name, the Witty Pi 5 HAT+ is designed to be compatible with all Raspberry Pi single-board computers following the Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) or Hardware Attached on Top Plus (HAT+) specifications — which means any with a 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, excluding only the oldest variants of original Raspberry Pi Model A and Model B boards, the Compute Module family without suitable carrier board, and the Pico family of microcontroller boards.

The board includes two options for power: USB Type-C and a straight DC input supporting up to 30V, both feeding the attached Raspberry Pi a full 5V 5A when used with a suitable power supply. Elsewhere on the board is a hardware real-time clock with battery backup, a dedicated temperature sensor, and a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller that supports time- and temperature-based power operations. When using the DC input, meanwhile, the board can monitor the input voltage and trigger a safe power-off if the voltage dips below a configurable level.

The Witty Pi 5 HAT+ is available on the UUGear store now at €39 (around $45) including mounting hardware.