This does cause some challenges though, as voltage sensing on the high side is difficult while maintaining isolation, so some clever tricks were implemented to maintain the correct target output voltage. This has the benefit of a floating ground which reduces the risk of accidental shock. Every high voltage part is hidden behind double insulation, and there is complete isolation between the high and low voltage sides thanks to a flyback converter.

But before getting there, has built one of the safest looking circuits we’ve seen in recent memory. In this case, the high voltages will eventually be used for electrophoresis or electrowetting. What we could perhaps all agree on, though, is that getting 300 volts out of a USB power supply is certainly a “high voltage” we wouldn’t normally expect to see in that kind of context, but needed just such a power supply and was eventually able to create one. For someone working on the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi it might be as little as 5 volts, someone working on a Tesla coil might consider that to be around 20 kV, and an electrical line worker might not reference something as HV until 115 kV. Those who work in different spaces may have different definitions of the term “high voltage”. Posted in Parts Tagged buck, buck converter, converter, dc, dc-dc, mp9486, power supply Take a look at this explanation we featured a while back to see more about how buck converters, the more easily understood among them, work. The board is assembled in an incredibly tiny package with inputs and outputs readily accessible, so it would be fairly simple to add one into a project rather than designing it from scratch.Įven though buck converters, and other DC converters like boost and the mysterious buck-boost converter, seem like magic even to us, there is some interesting electrical theory going on if you’re willing to dive into the inner workings of high-frequency switching. The circuit was modified a little bit to support the higher input voltage ranges and improve its stability and reliability.

While it is possible to use a multipurpose microcontroller like something from Atmel to perform the switching operation needed for DC-DC converters, using a purpose-built chip saves a lot of headache. The buck converter was designed by using a MP9486 chip. This one can take a huge range of input voltages to output a constant 5V. Someone from that time would have needed a huge clunky machine like a motor-generator set to convert DC voltages, but we can do it with ease using a few integrated circuits. Computers are everywhere now and are much more reliable, but there are other less obvious changes as well. For those living before the invention of the transistor, the modern world must appear almost magical.

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