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I am thinking of feeding another raspberry through the strompi’s usb output. My goal: secure this raspberry when there is a powerfailure. This second raspberry is for smartmeter functionallity and uses usb serial communication so it cannot be combined with a strompi on it.

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is this a realistic solution?

Hello Bert,

yes, you could do it like that, but you have to make sure that your total current consumption is 3 A or lower, of course, the power supply used must also be selected accordingly.
In addition, care must be taken that the voltage drop across the USB cable is not so significant that the Raspberry Pi receives too little voltage.

There is also a way to use the StromPi while simultaneously using the serial interface.
For that, you either need to use the Serialless-Mode of the StromPi or the dedicated Serialless-Firmware.

In Serialless-Mode, the warning for the failure of the primary power supply is no longer sent via the serial interface, but via a free GPIO pin.
That way the serial interface is only used if changes have to be made to the configuration of the StromPi.

The serialless mode is also described in our manual and for the serialless firmware, there is a different manual that can be downloaded together with the firmware from our download area.

Best regards

Tim (Joy-IT)