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Makita USB power supply board

dat2zip

Flashlight Enthusiast
Joined
Jan 5, 2002
Messages
3,420
Location
Bay Area
Haven't posted any news lately and thought I would share a project I'm working on.

Using one of the Makita dock parts we stock I made a converter board that fits on the Makita dock as shown below.
53b1e79b.jpg


The board supplies 5V through the USB connector up to 2A of power. It will re-charge/power any device that uses a USB cable like the Iphone, Ipod touch and many other devices.

With this portable power I can now safely keep my Iphone4 charged and be able to geocache all day without worries of running the battery down. The geocache app on the iphone tends to drain the battery in less than 4 hours of use limiting the amount of time one can be out in the field.

I have tested this with my Iphone4 and my HP Touchpad directly and also the HP Touchstone inductive charger base. All can be run from this.

To prevent metal contacts from causing shorts on the board I have encapsulated the critical sections with arctic Alumina 5 minute epoxy and also used it to glue down the heat sink on the converter IC.

There is a green power indicator LED and a red low battery indicator that kicks in when the battery voltage drops below 15V. (Tested it kicked in at 15.2V on this proto).

Wayne
 
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