The Omzlo PiJack HAT features a barrel-type power jack for DC wall supplies, with a 5.5mm jack and a 2.1mm center pole diameter. You can also optionally solder:
- A 2 pin 3.5mm screw terminal block in order to connect power supply wires directly to the HAT.
- A 2 pin 2.54mm header in order to connect the 5V output to something else than the Raspberry Pi.
The board also features an "ideal diode" that protects the Raspberry Pi USB net in case the Raspberry Pi is accidentally connected both to the PiJack HAT and USB power.
By default, the board is provided without a 2x20 GPIO header. As an option, you can add am unsoldered 2X20 pin GPIO header with short leads, or you can select an unsoldered stacking header 2x20, with extra long leads, instead.
The board layout is described in the picture below:
A Raspberry Pi board is not included with the PiJack HAT: you can connect it to any Pi Zero, Pi 2 model B/B+, Pi 3 model B/B+. It will also work with the Pi 4,
Free yourself from USB and power your next Raspberry Pi with the PiJack HAT!
Story
This is an "accidental" byproduct of another bigger project: the NoCAN IoT platform, which offers a network of Arduino-compatible nodes managed by a Raspberry Pi, using CANbus and a common 12V (or 24V) power rail. Since we wanted to power everything with 12V (or 24V), we needed to design a solution to power the Raspberry Pi as well.
We found out that adding a DC power jack to a Raspberry Pi can be quite useful for many projects, allowing you to accept a much wider range of voltage inputs than the typical 5V provided through USB. So we decided to create this HAT and share it with the community, as described in our blog:
As far as we know, this is the only Raspberry Pi power supply HAT that accepts such as wide range of voltages, providing up to 1.7A, while being fully open-source/open-hardware.
In the end, it's a very simple but useful device.
This product is open-hardware, design files are available here.
This is version 3 of the PiJack, which uses an SMT jack connector instead of the PTH connector found on version 2.