The Design and Features of the Pi Sugar S Plus

I've always been a fan of this design. The original Pi Sugar was quite sleek, and it looks like they've kept that same style with the S Plus. They've made some nice tweaks to the design, such as adding a new LED indicator on the front of the unit. This is not only a cosmetic change but also a functional one, as it will let me know when the battery level is low.

The Pi Sugar S Plus is powered by a 5000 milliamp hour battery, which should provide all day power for my Raspberry Pi. The Pi itself comes with an HDMI port, but I'll need to plug in a separate USB cable to charge the battery and power the Pi. Luckily, this is easy enough to do - just plug it into the Pi's USB port, or use the included micro-USB port on the back of the unit.

I'm running Raspberry Pi OS on my new S Plus, and I'm excited to see how it performs. The only thing I'll need to plug in besides the HDMI cable is that SD card - but even with a 32 gigabyte microSD card, boot times are incredibly quick. It's one of the reasons I prefer using an SSD over an SD card - it makes such a big difference in performance.

I decided to put the S Plus through its paces by running some video playback and Chrome browsing. I chose a 720p YouTube video and watched as the Pi Sugar S Plus played it for six hours and 23 minutes before shutting down on me. This isn't bad at all - if you look at the Tenda Store page, they claim that the Raspberry Pi 3B will last up to 10 hours with this same battery.

The comparison chart between the different Pi Sugar models is also quite interesting. The S Plus is missing some features compared to the S2 Pro, such as a real-time clock and scheduled power on/off capabilities via the web GUI. However, it does come with all of the other essential features, including the custom button on the side that can be programmed.

One thing to note about charging the battery - you cannot charge it from the Raspberry Pi itself. You'll need to plug directly into the Pi Sugar S Plus's PCB using a USB-C or micro-USB cable. However, when this unit is plugged in, it will also power the Pi and charge the battery.

Using Solar Power with the Pi Sugar

I've recently been playing around with solar-powered systems, and I think that the Pi Sugar S Plus could be a great option for running my Raspberry Pi continuously on solar power. To do this, you'll need a 30-watt panel, which is something I already have - but I'm waiting on a new controller that includes a built-in battery of its own.

The idea behind using a controller with a built-in battery is to be able to run the Raspberry Pi for hours or even days without needing to recharge. This would allow me to use solar power as my primary source of energy, rather than relying on batteries or other external power sources. It's still in the works - but I'm excited about the possibilities.

In Conclusion

If you're looking for a less expensive alternative to the original Pi Sugar 2 Pro, then the S Plus is definitely worth considering. While it doesn't have all of the same features, there are some compromises that I can personally live without. With the price reduction, I think this could be an excellent option for those on a budget.

As always, I'd love to hear from you - if you have any questions or comments about the Pi Sugar S Plus, please let me know in the comments below. And don't forget to like and subscribe for more content - new videos are coming soon!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all-new pie sugar s plus from the pie sugar company now if you're not familiar with these pie sugar devices basically what it is is a battery pack and a pcb for your raspberry pi and this one is designed for the raspberry pi 4 but it will work with the 0 3 and 3b plus for this video i'm going to be using a raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model but when it comes to the new s-plus model of the pi sugar it does come in a lot cheaper than the original pro 2 but it is dumbed down a bit we can no longer access the online ui to see what kind of battery percentage we have and everything like that but we still get that power on switch usb type c there's also micro usb and a 5 000 milliamp hour battery paired with their custom pcb that does output 3 amps for your raspberry pi 4. i'm a big fan of the original pi sugar 2 and i did do a video on that i'll leave a link for it in the description but a lot of people were complaining about the price it is 49.99 but the new s model aimed to fix that this one's coming in at 29.99 instead of 49.99 for the original pro 2 but we still get that 5 000 milliamp hour battery and you can get anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of battery life out of this thing it really depends on what your raspberry pi is doing this unit does output 5 volts at 3 amps so it's plenty for the raspberry pi 4. this battery is replaceable it magnetically attaches to the pcb and as long as you have power to this board the raspberry pi will still be powered up and you can kind of hot swap these batteries if you ever needed to do that it's super easy to install and get set up and the way it attaches to your raspberry pi is from the bottom it uses these pogo pens that line right up with the bottom of your gpio it's actually a pretty ingenious idea here that way we're not blocking off the top of the raspberry pi and you can actually install a cooler and by the way pie sugar does make a case i wasn't able to get my hands on it if i can later on down the road i will do a video on it here's a closer look at the battery and the pcb this is a 5 000 milliamp hour battery and they're claiming five to eight hours of battery life out of this thing the battery does attach to the pcb using this magnet and as for the pcb itself it's got a lot of stuff built in here we have our battery in usb type c a function switch which will allow us to turn this on while the power switch is on micro usb in case you don't have access to usb type c to charge that battery up we also have a two pin five volt power output for different accessories and the first thing i thought of was just a little fan to cool the cpu down and we also have an auto startup switch so you can easily turn this function on or off when comparing the pi sugar s plus to the pi sugar 2 pro this is missing some features like the built-in rtc that web ui so we can actually reprogram the switches easily just by a click of a button and there's no way to set up the s plus for timing boot with the other one you could actually just go in and say exactly what time you want this to come on and go off with the s plus we just can't do that but it's still super easy to install like i mentioned the pcb actually goes on the bottom of your raspberry pi i'm using that raspberry pi 4 and it's going to line right up with those gpio pins so if you don't have gpio pins on your raspberry pi if you desoldered them for some reason this probably won't work so easily but i mean you could always solder it to the board if you wanted to so basically we just need to line this up correctly it comes with all of the mounting hardware and there's a little bit of kapton tape on these screw holes so i just kind of make an indention in them makes it a lot easier to get these screws in so we'll line that right back up with those gpio pins and really all you need to do is line this up with the holes on the board we got four screws to secure it and what i do is just go in almost all the way with each of them and then i tighten down the gpio side just a little more just to make sure that this is making a good connection with those pogo pins and once i have that pcb mounted it's time to install that battery but real quick i wanted to show you how it lines up with those pens really nice little design here i've always liked this this is what they did with the original pie sugar and they've brought it over to the pie sugar s plus last thing that's left to do is plug the battery in and it mounts super easy to the back because it uses a magnet and yeah i mean the pi will sit flat you may have to bend the wire just a little bit so it's not hitting the table or whatever you have this laying on but now we have a fully battery powered raspberry pi 4. i'm running raspberry pi os on this pi 4 and the only thing i'll need to plug in is that hdmi because i'm now fully battery powered we have that led indicator and the unit is now booting up from a 32 gigabyte micro sd card now recently i've been running all of my raspberry pi's from an ssd and the boot time is so much quicker than sd i forget how long it takes but here we are in the desktop running on full battery power so i've got the pi sugar s-plus fully charged and what i wanted to do was just run this down it's definitely going to take a little while but i think i'm just going to do some video playback i'm going to open up the chrome browser we'll do some 720p youtube playback and just see how long it lasts and the results are in raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model connected over wi-fi it's ac wi-fi continuous youtube 720p streaming 6 hours and 23 minutes before it shut down on me which isn't bad at all because if we look at their tendy store page here you can see that they claim 10 hours on the raspberry pi 3b so six and a half hours on a raspberry pi 4 which does pull more power than the 3b on a 5000 milliamp hour battery isn't bad at all if we scroll down a bit here we have all the information we need to know about this and they have a comparison chart between the pi sugar one pi sugar s the s plus which we took a look at pi sugar two and the pi sugar two pro pi sugar two pro has all of the features built in like that web gui and basically with the s plus we're missing the web gui no rtc support so we don't have a real time clock built in and timing boot which is basically a scheduled power on and power off that you can program from that web gui but everything else here is supported plus we have that custom button on the side that can be programmed so yeah that 20 price difference does make sense but if you need all of those features i would definitely go with the pi sugar 2 pro when charging up the pie sugar's battery you cannot go from the usb type c port on the raspberry pi you do have to plug directly into the pi sugar's pcb that's why we have that usb type-c and micro usb but when this is plugged in it will also power the pi and charge the battery unfortunately it just won't charge from that usb port on the pi itself but overall i mean this isn't bad it's right in the same place and it's not hard to get to it another way you could actually charge this up and power the raspberry pi is over solar now i do have a video coming up soon so keep an eye on the channel i've been playing in this for a while i just really hadn't gotten around to it but the pie sugar is going to make this a lot easier and i do have this 30 watt panel along with this controller but i'm waiting on a new controller that actually has a battery built in it's just a smaller 10 000 milliamp hour battery but what this should allow me to do is run this raspberry pi continuously on solar power so if you're interested in seeing the setup on that definitely keep an eye on the channel hopefully i'll have that up in the next week or so it's just really a matter of getting that new controller in but with a setup like this the raspberry pi itself really isn't running off of solar power it's running off of the batteries and in turn the solar panel itself is charging those batteries up but it should be pretty cool so in the end if you were looking for a less expensive alternative to the original pi sugar 2 pro then the pi sugar s plus is definitely for you it is missing some of those features but it's something that i can personally live without and with that 20 price reduction i do think this would make sense but that's gonna wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching if you're interested in picking up the s plus or even the 2 pro i will leave links in the description if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching youhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the all-new pie sugar s plus from the pie sugar company now if you're not familiar with these pie sugar devices basically what it is is a battery pack and a pcb for your raspberry pi and this one is designed for the raspberry pi 4 but it will work with the 0 3 and 3b plus for this video i'm going to be using a raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model but when it comes to the new s-plus model of the pi sugar it does come in a lot cheaper than the original pro 2 but it is dumbed down a bit we can no longer access the online ui to see what kind of battery percentage we have and everything like that but we still get that power on switch usb type c there's also micro usb and a 5 000 milliamp hour battery paired with their custom pcb that does output 3 amps for your raspberry pi 4. i'm a big fan of the original pi sugar 2 and i did do a video on that i'll leave a link for it in the description but a lot of people were complaining about the price it is 49.99 but the new s model aimed to fix that this one's coming in at 29.99 instead of 49.99 for the original pro 2 but we still get that 5 000 milliamp hour battery and you can get anywhere from 5 to 10 hours of battery life out of this thing it really depends on what your raspberry pi is doing this unit does output 5 volts at 3 amps so it's plenty for the raspberry pi 4. this battery is replaceable it magnetically attaches to the pcb and as long as you have power to this board the raspberry pi will still be powered up and you can kind of hot swap these batteries if you ever needed to do that it's super easy to install and get set up and the way it attaches to your raspberry pi is from the bottom it uses these pogo pens that line right up with the bottom of your gpio it's actually a pretty ingenious idea here that way we're not blocking off the top of the raspberry pi and you can actually install a cooler and by the way pie sugar does make a case i wasn't able to get my hands on it if i can later on down the road i will do a video on it here's a closer look at the battery and the pcb this is a 5 000 milliamp hour battery and they're claiming five to eight hours of battery life out of this thing the battery does attach to the pcb using this magnet and as for the pcb itself it's got a lot of stuff built in here we have our battery in usb type c a function switch which will allow us to turn this on while the power switch is on micro usb in case you don't have access to usb type c to charge that battery up we also have a two pin five volt power output for different accessories and the first thing i thought of was just a little fan to cool the cpu down and we also have an auto startup switch so you can easily turn this function on or off when comparing the pi sugar s plus to the pi sugar 2 pro this is missing some features like the built-in rtc that web ui so we can actually reprogram the switches easily just by a click of a button and there's no way to set up the s plus for timing boot with the other one you could actually just go in and say exactly what time you want this to come on and go off with the s plus we just can't do that but it's still super easy to install like i mentioned the pcb actually goes on the bottom of your raspberry pi i'm using that raspberry pi 4 and it's going to line right up with those gpio pins so if you don't have gpio pins on your raspberry pi if you desoldered them for some reason this probably won't work so easily but i mean you could always solder it to the board if you wanted to so basically we just need to line this up correctly it comes with all of the mounting hardware and there's a little bit of kapton tape on these screw holes so i just kind of make an indention in them makes it a lot easier to get these screws in so we'll line that right back up with those gpio pins and really all you need to do is line this up with the holes on the board we got four screws to secure it and what i do is just go in almost all the way with each of them and then i tighten down the gpio side just a little more just to make sure that this is making a good connection with those pogo pins and once i have that pcb mounted it's time to install that battery but real quick i wanted to show you how it lines up with those pens really nice little design here i've always liked this this is what they did with the original pie sugar and they've brought it over to the pie sugar s plus last thing that's left to do is plug the battery in and it mounts super easy to the back because it uses a magnet and yeah i mean the pi will sit flat you may have to bend the wire just a little bit so it's not hitting the table or whatever you have this laying on but now we have a fully battery powered raspberry pi 4. i'm running raspberry pi os on this pi 4 and the only thing i'll need to plug in is that hdmi because i'm now fully battery powered we have that led indicator and the unit is now booting up from a 32 gigabyte micro sd card now recently i've been running all of my raspberry pi's from an ssd and the boot time is so much quicker than sd i forget how long it takes but here we are in the desktop running on full battery power so i've got the pi sugar s-plus fully charged and what i wanted to do was just run this down it's definitely going to take a little while but i think i'm just going to do some video playback i'm going to open up the chrome browser we'll do some 720p youtube playback and just see how long it lasts and the results are in raspberry pi 4 8 gigabyte model connected over wi-fi it's ac wi-fi continuous youtube 720p streaming 6 hours and 23 minutes before it shut down on me which isn't bad at all because if we look at their tendy store page here you can see that they claim 10 hours on the raspberry pi 3b so six and a half hours on a raspberry pi 4 which does pull more power than the 3b on a 5000 milliamp hour battery isn't bad at all if we scroll down a bit here we have all the information we need to know about this and they have a comparison chart between the pi sugar one pi sugar s the s plus which we took a look at pi sugar two and the pi sugar two pro pi sugar two pro has all of the features built in like that web gui and basically with the s plus we're missing the web gui no rtc support so we don't have a real time clock built in and timing boot which is basically a scheduled power on and power off that you can program from that web gui but everything else here is supported plus we have that custom button on the side that can be programmed so yeah that 20 price difference does make sense but if you need all of those features i would definitely go with the pi sugar 2 pro when charging up the pie sugar's battery you cannot go from the usb type c port on the raspberry pi you do have to plug directly into the pi sugar's pcb that's why we have that usb type-c and micro usb but when this is plugged in it will also power the pi and charge the battery unfortunately it just won't charge from that usb port on the pi itself but overall i mean this isn't bad it's right in the same place and it's not hard to get to it another way you could actually charge this up and power the raspberry pi is over solar now i do have a video coming up soon so keep an eye on the channel i've been playing in this for a while i just really hadn't gotten around to it but the pie sugar is going to make this a lot easier and i do have this 30 watt panel along with this controller but i'm waiting on a new controller that actually has a battery built in it's just a smaller 10 000 milliamp hour battery but what this should allow me to do is run this raspberry pi continuously on solar power so if you're interested in seeing the setup on that definitely keep an eye on the channel hopefully i'll have that up in the next week or so it's just really a matter of getting that new controller in but with a setup like this the raspberry pi itself really isn't running off of solar power it's running off of the batteries and in turn the solar panel itself is charging those batteries up but it should be pretty cool so in the end if you were looking for a less expensive alternative to the original pi sugar 2 pro then the pi sugar s plus is definitely for you it is missing some of those features but it's something that i can personally live without and with that 20 price reduction i do think this would make sense but that's gonna wrap it up for this video really appreciate you watching if you're interested in picking up the s plus or even the 2 pro i will leave links in the description if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching you\n"