Category Archives: Power Supply


DIY power bank using recycled Laptop battery

This DIY power bank project from Do It Yourself Gadgets uses recycled laptop battery and a 5V boost converter to construct an USB charger. This article will show you the basic powerbank circuit consisting of Lithium cell charging circuit, boost converter and toggle switch as well as my improved version with self activating boost converter and LED status indicator and homemade housing. It all started with an old Lenovo laptop battery. I carefully pried it open to examine the cells. Three packs of two parallel 18650 Lithium 2200 mAh cells were connected in series.

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Prototyping board with built-in power supply

This prototyping board with built-in regulated power supplies was designed by Electro-Lab and consists of four independent DC-DC buck converters based on LM2675-ADJ and generates 3.3V, 5V, 12V and -12V at 1A. Prototyping is a useful and powerful method in electronics which lets us analyze a circuit before using it in a system or turning it into a product. In this process we may need a single supply or multiple supplies to power the circuit depending on the type of the application. For example, an op-amp circuit may need a symmetrical supply such as +12V and -12V or a logic circuit

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Dual channel battery charger plus analyzer

K.C. Lee‘s dual channel battery charger is a microcontroller-based efficient switching mode power supply design for not only the charging job but also for determining the charge/discharge characteristics of batteries. It is a battery charger/analyzer. It is not going to save the world from an alien invasion or cure cancer or something equally noble. It is a nice tool for recycling or buying cheap batteries of unknown capacity/performance as it’ll let you test the discharge characteristics. What set this charger design different are: Flexible power source – two independent buck/boost converters allow higher/lower than input voltage. So you could be charging

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Open source, modular bench power supply

Here’s a neat bench power supply design from a Hackaday user which offers very interesting features such as software calibration, programmatic control via USB Raw HID, etc at an affordable price. While this is still an ongoing project, the author defines his final goals of this project as: Modular power supply from 1 to 6 channels (I am planning on having 4: 3x positive, 1x negative) Each channel can independently be set from 0-12V (for positive channels) or -12-0V (for negative channels), and the output can go all the way to 0. Configurable set points for voltage and max current for

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Making a low cost portable phone charger

If you have any spare old phones with no use lying around, you may want to use their batteries to build this portable charger for your new smartphone. On the electronics side, this project only requires a LiPo battery charger module and a step-up voltage converter module, both of which can be bought for less than $5 on eBay.

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