Power Supply Protection for Raspberry-Pi

Defining the Problem, Again

The power rails of the Raspberry-Pi are bought out on the GPIO header as well as the IO pins.  This is both a blessing and a curse.

The advantage of this is that you have 5V and 3V3 rails available to power your circuitry that you are hooking up to your GPIO pins, but again, as the Raspberry-Pi doesn't have any protection circuitry you run the risk of killing your Raspberry-Pi through:

• Short Circuiting the Rail
• Reverse Biasing the Rail
• Over-Volting the Rail

GPIO Protection For Raspberry-Pi

Or How Not to Let the magic Smoke Out

Previously I've written about my love / hate relationship with Polyswitches, and discussed some input and output pin protection methods.  I was looking into this so I could make a breakout board / protection device for experimenting with my Raspberry-Pi and not let out the magic smoke.

I could say it's to help kids / beginners protect themselves from basic mistakes, but even after practicing Engineering for nearly 20 years I have learn that Murphy still bites, so it's also a lesson in self preservation :)

Testing