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Re:Reasons a Raspberry Pi Belongs in Your Network Lab by vbezhenar on Thursday December 29, 2022 @06:11AM (#34171508)
UPS for small devices is an untapped niche. I don't understand what's going on with that. There're thousands of huge 220V UPS devices in the market and there're almost none 12V UPS devices for tiny devices like routers, raspberrys, etc.

Some people use power banks for that, but that's not really proper use and some power banks don't allow seamless power switch.

Re:Reasons a Raspberry Pi Belongs in Your Network Lab by dgacmu on Thursday December 29, 2022 @07:20AM (#34171919)
I've been using a little 100wh mini 12v UPS from talentcell. I own three and am happy with them.

It has an important caveat though: both the USB and 12v outputs are unregulated, so the device you're feeding into must be able to handle a wider voltage range, or you can buy a fairly cheap ($15 or so) step up/down converter to put in-line with it.

Re:Reasons a Raspberry Pi Belongs in Your Network Lab by eternityforest on Thursday December 29, 2022 @08:30AM (#34172393)
How does the average consumer feel about plugging something other than the OEM adapter into a router? Things always say "Use only the original power supply", maybe they underestimate people's intelligence and think they will be too afraid to put the UPS in between?

I'd really like an affordable 5v/12v UPS though. Maybe it will happen when more things adopt USB-C and there's more of a market for power banks designed for seamless switching.

Re:Reasons a Raspberry Pi Belongs in Your Network Lab by HybridCurve on Thursday December 29, 2022 @09:08AM (#34172697)
Belkin makes a 12v UPS for residential gateway devices. Some ISPs here in the US have been distributing them with their equipment to consumers for several years. I use mine as power backup for devices in case of hurricanes and such.
Re:Reasons a Raspberry Pi Belongs in Your Network Lab by seba_dos1 on Thursday December 29, 2022 @01:18PM (#34175893)
I'm using PowerWalker 12V DC UPS (which actually is just a 18650 cell) with my routers and it works fine, keeping the connectivity up for intermittent power shortages. In fact works much better for this purpose than cheap AC UPS I tried.
Re:Reasons a Raspberry Pi Belongs in Your Network Lab by ilyt on Thursday December 29, 2022 @01:50PM (#34176287)
There is UPS Pico [1] for rPi3/4 that does that job well + a bunch of other features (fan control, some extra IO, supercap+battery support, watchdog and few other).

There are also few simpler ones that do "just" supply power and "power good" signal.

There is also plenty of DC UPSes, although often targeting the industry, which means "expensive"

In-between is [2] OpenUPS but I didn't used it. It's just pretty niche product and niche is also one of the "it will be expensive" keywords.

Soo yeah, they are out there and work fine, go and buy one. Oh, don't want to spend more than rPi ? Well, that's the price of niche products, even if parts are not super expensive it need to cost enough for NRE costs to amortize.

Or, slap a power strip and few power supplies into normal UPS and call it good enough

* [1] https://pimodules.com/ups-pico-hv4-0b

* [2] https://www.mini-box.com/OpenUPS