Smart charger and 5V portable power supply

 

SMART CHARGERNowadays almost every electronic gadgets are powered or recharged by a USB port (full size, mini o micro) as well as many of consumer products we use every day, including our smartphone. To recharge or give power to such products, there are many portable rechargers which have a rechargeable lithium battery and the electronics necessary to convert the battery voltage to 5V and to recharge the internal cell. The cost of these smart chargers is very affordable but we’re hardware makers, aren’t we? So why don’t to do it by ourselves to give power to our Raspberry Pi, arduino or Beaglebone black? We’ll show you a possible way to design one of these intelligent portable power supply. Continue reading

Arduino shields adapter for mbed

MBED_ADAPTEREveryone knows the versatility of arduino shields and the power of mbed boards so why don’t to design an adapter which allows to use arduino shields with mbed? This is the schematic of our version of such adapter:

schematicAs you can see it is compatible with both mbed LPC1768 (http://mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC1768/) and mbed LPC11U24 (http://mbed.org/platforms/mbed-LPC11U24/) and has a USB type A connector and a ethernet connector, useful in your projects with TCP/IP and LPC1768. A DC plug and a 5V LDO regulator Reg1117 has been added to supply power  to the mbed and to the shield in a very easy way, if you don’t want to use the USB as a power supply.

mbed application board

Mbed family has grown in the last months and nowadays the available platforms include different solutions furthermore the chipsets and the MCUs on this amazing hardware are not only made by NXP but there are many other important players like Freescale and ST:

https://mbed.org/platforms/

 Mbed community is huge and healty and the “competitors” of this prototyping platform (which are many) can’t take the leadership: mbed is still the best development platform for ARM microcontrollers. To start with mbed, one of the most one practical way is using the mbed application board, well suited to test all the features of the LPC1768:

mbed_app_board_

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