X728 (Max 5.1V 5A) UPS & Power Management Board for Raspberry Pi 4

Works great with the X728-C case and my pi 4. Definitely recommend using chatGPT for the necessary scripts to enable auto shutdown, buzzer sounding and push-button behavior. I swapped out the always-on fan for a 40x40x10 mm raspberry pi fan which is controlled by GPIO14. It required chipping out the corners of the mounting holes on the fan to fit, but then fit just fine and now only comes on when needed. Really great product. I highly recommend this UPS.

I purchased one of these for my OctoPi/OctoPrint setup and I was having issues with the X728. The unit would turn on the RPi just fine, I could read the battery level just fine, and I could run the power test (too see if the RPi was being powered off batteries or the 5V input. But, I could not get the soft shutdown and power off to work at all. I actually returned the first one thinking it was defective and right after that, Geekworm contacted me, via the Amazon portal, to see if they could do anything to help me get this working. After several email exchanges of trying different things, I found, in my case, that one of the 3rd-party plug-in for OctoPrint was interfering with the communications for the soft shutdown. While they didn't come up with the exact solution, they hung in there with me with suggestions while we got it diagnosed and working.

I put this UPS HAT on a Raspberry Pi 4B as part of a little “mobile lab” setup and it has been great so far. My stack is a Pi 4B on Raspberry Pi OS, a GeekPi PWM cooling hat with a small screen I am not really using yet, and a Panda PAU0F USB Wi-Fi adapter, all powered through this board with two 18650 batteries. Setup was easy. I watched the video the seller links, dropped the 18650 cells into the holder, plugged USB-C power into the hat, and let the hat feed the Pi through the GPIO header. It powered up on the first try and after that I mostly stopped thinking about it. The real test for me was what happens when you pull the plug. When I unplug the USB-C input, the Pi just keeps running. No reboot, no undervoltage icon, no SD card complaints. I have let this setup run on battery for a little over three hours and it stayed completely stable the whole time, which is more than enough for how I plan to use it. I actually started with a regular USB power bank and assumed that would work as a UPS. It did not. As soon as I unplugged the power bank from the wall, the Pi died instantly. That is what pushed me to try a proper UPS hat, and this one does exactly what I wanted. It turned my Pi 4 into something I can unplug, move around, or briefly lose mains on without worrying about corrupting the SD card.

This UPS meets most of my needs, but I wish the python2 scripts for managing it were updated by the manufacturer and if possible made compatible with more and newer operating systems. After rewriting some things from the .py scripts provided on the wiki it works with OpenWRT enough to poll the battery percentage and do a controlled shutdown before the battery reaches low voltage cutoff, but I left it at 'good enough' so I don't have power loss detection or 1 or 2 power button functions working yet. One odd thing I noticed about this UPS is the battery percentage fluctuates on AC power. When I put the (brand new) cells in the first time I noticed they charged to 100%, then the controller goes into some kind of discharge cycle that takes it down close to 90% before charging back to 100% and repeating... over and over. From what I have read lithium *should* be okay in this range, and hopefully daily repeated cycles won't wear out the battery in just the top 10% of charge after thousands of cycles like this. Maybe the charge controller needs a full discharge/charge cycle to learn the capacity? More research needed, but they are all brand new balanced cells. I've had a few short power outages in the past couple of months, but nothing long enough to test the full runtime on the 4 18650 cells that are connected. I expect to get a few hours out of them just running the Pi and a couple of USB NICs. There are some other UPS solutions for the Pi that can be scheduled to boot at a certain time, but for a routing device this seems to be fairly solid so far. I like the selection modular 18650 holders with mounting holes and standoffs!

The product looks like have very good build quality with all nice features. I kept this setup running on my desk for debugging, and touch it with my fingers, and then it caught on fire!!! It was unlike fire on paper, but more like explosive style while shooting flames around. it didn't end up well. The whole house smells really bad for few days, even with all the windows open. It might be because it spread small flames to the floor and funitures. I gave two stars instead of one because I touched it with my finger that may short the board. I'm not an ECE guy at all, but a pure software engineer. so I'm not sure whether I caused the whole scene. My respberry pi 4b is still able to boot but the bluetooth and the wireless functions were destroyed. Sad. : ' (

I use these in an rpi5 cluster that is rackmounted. I choose this ups for my rpi5 because most of the dedicated rpi5 ones are bottom ones that don't work with the rack front io cutout due to increasing height below the rpi. These work well, but i wish the usb c power port was rear or forward facing as with my rpi cluster using the side is difficult cable managment wise. I've actually broke a usb c port off before taking the cluster out for maintainance. I particularly like the power switch header for safe shutdown with a momentary switch. It also has a power button on the board thats easier to access than the one on back of the pi.

Product works very well, and and provides much more power than other similar systems. I'm able to power a Raspberry Pi 4 as well as a 5V USB powered router from the 5V pins on top of the board. They likely don't link to it because Amazon blocks them, but they also have extremely good documentation on their wiki which is easily found by google searching "X728 Geekworm." Their documentation provides both hardware specifications, as well as links to code repos to see how you can read current voltage and battery life status in for either display, auto timeout features, etc.

Using the included 2.5 x 20 mm standoffs created an initially annoying problem. The 40 pin header extenders I have were about 6 mm too long, making the UPS float way above the Pi and preventing the stackup from fitting in the Geekworm metal case. I first trimmed down the pins on the header extender. That didn't get the UPS board low enough to fit in the metal case. I finally trimmed down the plastic on the header extender, that dropped the UPS by another 2 mm and solved the problem. Nowhere do they mention that a non-standard-height 40-pin header is required to get the stackup to work in the case. That was kind of annoying. Second annoyance is the "ac power" input. Where/what is this? The UPS board doesn't take ac power. So I'm guessing that it's the 5521 jack? As well, why would that jack be rated for only 5 Vdc? This should be designed to take a wide voltage range (10-30 Vdc would be great) that that I could power it in the truck without having to custom build yet another 12 to 5.1 stepdown converter. Other than these significant annoyances the UPS seems to work fine. I haven't yet installed the software to enable the autoshutdown feature. Since this is for the truck, I appreciate a UPS to prevent glitches getting to the RPi.