New Lab. 2020-12-15

Finally the new lab is up and running. Everything has its place and the workspace is well thougth thru. Instruments are easy accessed and there is alot of space to work on!

Four4 usb charger. 2020-06-17

So it was time to make another kickstarter project. At first i needed a reliable charger at home due to that increasing number of gadgets we are charging. When i designed it i was so good that several collegues wanted one and they all liked it. It was then decided to make it as a crowdfunding project.

It uses the 16F18346 controller which is a cheap and feature packed mcu with alot of memory. At first i used a smaller mcu but when starting programming the memory wasn enought. The Oled display uses more than 50% of the memory due to it's drivers. Good to have in mind.

Another issue i had with this newer mcu was that i never succeeded to actually set up the registers correct to use the internal I2C modules. I ended up using software I2C. Slower but works fine in this  application.

Two sided main PCB is used and both top an bottom of the casing is black FR4 material. The sides are 3d printed

I put alot of effort into the product to make it bulletproof and i have worked more than 6 months on it. Had alot of issues with the wall power supply and discussed with the vendor.

I tested and verified everything to the extent that there were no isses left!!

One main feature of it was thet it had almost zero internal resistance and therfore it had very low voltage drop and powerloss at maximum charging power. It had really low temperature at high load!

The campaign failed unfortunatly bigtime. I had way to high pricing on a complete kit. Since i made it initially for myself i had no thougts on making it cheap and alter on it was hard to change the design.

I learned my lesson. Always keep prices as low as possible. People will NOT pay much even if the product is perfect