Just wondering how bad of an idea this is - can I safely power a Raspberry Pi from the 5V pin on the odrive board? I’m not sure how much spare juice that circuit has to offer.
For context: I plan on using the V3.6 odrive board @ 56 V and a Raspberry Pi 3B+. I would route power to the Pi through the micro-USB connector. My best guess is that the Pi would draw up to a couple amps.
Thanks.
The 5V is provided by the internal switching buck converter on one of the DRV8301 chips. This provides up to 1.5A (7.5W) and is overload protected, and is specifically meant for powering external circuits. So yes, I think it should handle a RPi without problems (the worst it will do is drop out on overcurrent protection).
The onboard logic of the ODrive will be using something in the 10s of mA, I would guess.
However, if you are using the latest & greatest Pi with lots of USB peripherals attached, you might run into issues. They recommend PSU capacity up to 3.0A, because the Pi can supply up to 1.2A through USB, and will also use up to 1.8A itself if you load the CPU up to max. You might have to throttle back the maximum clock speed on the Pi or disable some cores.
Then again if it works off a standard USB port on your PC, it will be fine.
Really appreciate the explanation!
If you should run into any issues, there are cheap buck converters on ebay that can do the job.
If you have only 36V there are even cheaper ones available.
If you plan on attaching other things to the raspberry pie, you might have to buy one