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PGCPSU – Pretty Good Cheap Power Supply Unit on Kickstarter

By on April 9, 2019
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PGCPSU is a three in one power supply board and it integrates a lithium battery charge management circuit with 5V and 3.3V DC-DC converter-based output rails to power most projects in a very compact form factor.

This affordable yet powerful LiPo PSU module is available on Kickstarter from just €7 and worldwide deliveries expected to take place sometime around May 2019.

Features and specifications of the LiPo PSU module include :

  • 5V output rail providing at least (*) 350mA
  • 3.3V rail providing at least (*) 400mA
  • low quiescent current (49uA for the 5V rail + 57uA for the 3.3V rail)
  • enable/disable pin for the 3.3V rail with selectable default state solder jumper
  • micro USB input or pin header for charging (4.7V to 6V max.)
  • high efficiency even at low load (important for great battery life!)
  • small / tiny with only 25x20mm
  • good line regulation
  • quick charging at up to 1.9A (fully charges our awesome 2600mAh cell in just over 2h!)
  • integrated battery protection (including reverse polarity protection!)
  • good fault tolerance and recovery behaviour (over-discharge, short circuit/over-current etc…)

On Kickstarter crowdfunding page the developers behind the PGCPSU also provide some possible applications for the PSU module:

  • Running the Arduino Blinky sketch for 3,5 days (or over 25 days with a bit of tweaking like removing the power LED, disabling the USB-UART, bypassing the LDO, using sleep states etc….)
  • Running a Raspberry PI Zero W posting its uptime to a REST API via WiFi for 17 hours
  • Running an ESP8622 based soil moisture and temperature sensor for … well it’s been running for 4 months now, posting a measurement every 10 minutes …same for an ESP8622 based WiFi / PIR motion sensor
  • Using it as an uninterruptible power supply for an Arduino based test data acquisition system (not ideal for the Lithium cell for sure – but it works superbly)

About Luca Ruggeri

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