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If you are into hardware hacking in any shape or form, having a handy power supply with which to power your latest prototype can be a real pain. Well, this tiny, USB-powered board can provide your project with up to 20 V! How are they pulling this off in such a tiny form factor?

With the release of USB Type C, the USB Implementers Forum created a standard called Power Delivery, which allows devices to charge at higher voltages and currents than the previous standards allowed for. Modern smartphones and laptops have started to take advantage of this, and are able to charge much faster due to the increased power available. Chargers which support Power Delivery can provide 20V at up to 5A (100W!) which is more than enough to charge the average laptop.

However, the charger won’t provide this extra power unless it is asked for, in order to maintain backward compatibility with older 5V-only USB equipment. To take advantage of this feature, you need a way to communicate with the charger over the new CC1 and CC2 lines in the USB-C cable. Once the attached device has asked for a higher voltage, the charger changes modes and delivers the requested voltage on the Vbus line. Not all chargers support all power levels, though. A charger can be Power Delivery compliant but only supply, say, 9 V at 3 A. This is plenty for the average smartphone, but just keep it in mind when you are choosing a charger to use with this board. So, the USB-C PD Sink is simply taking advantage of modern chargers with Power Delivery in order to provide a variable voltage power supply for whatever you want!

With just a compliant USB-C Power Delivery charger and the USB-C PD Sink, you can quickly and safely get enough power to keep all your projects moving! You can charge your quadcopter, or power your latest evil robot prototype — we won’t judge. The beauty of using a higher voltage is that you end up with less power dissipation in the cables, meaning more juice available for your project. It’s a win-win!

If you are interested in learning more about Power Delivery, the USB Implementers Forum has the full specification available on their website. It’s quite dense, and full of a lot of technical lingo, but it’s excellent that it’s freely available for us to learn from.

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Lithium polymer and lithium ion batteries — like all rechargeable batteries — have a limited lifespan determined by the number of charge/discharge cycles. Leaving your phone plugged in all the time increases the strain on the battery, reducing its useful lifespan and wasting energy. The ProCharge goes in-line with your charge cable, and automatically delays and monitors charging of your device. This way, you still wake up with a fully charged phone, but you’ve reduced the strain on the battery and saved energy by not running the charger all night!

There are software solutions available for both major phone OSes, but they cannot actually stop the phone from charging — they merely remind you to unplug the phone when it hits a certain charge percentage. This can also protect the battery, but you end up without a fully charged phone, and if you fall asleep before the notification goes off, it’s useless. Having a hardware solution like this is much more reliable, and doesn’t require user intervention, which means you’re more likely to actually see results!

This graph shows the potential energy savings. By delaying the charge cycle, you are saving energy, which adds up to about 90 days per year that you aren’t charging your phone! If you are concerned about your carbon footprint, simple devices like this are a great way to make an impact on your energy usage.

Because smartphone manufacturers are aware of the limited lifespan of lithium batteries, they have attempted to mitigate these issues in software. The phone can detect if the voltage starts dropping quickly when current increases — the sign of a weak or nearing end-of-life battery — and it responds by lowering the clock speed of the CPU. This leads to the device acting sluggish and often causes stability issues. However, if the phone continued to run at full speed, it would quickly drop the battery below its cutoff voltage and the phone would just shut off. Apple was vilified in the media a while ago for slowing down their older phones, but I suspect it was just this mechanism in action. They were trying to preserve what little battery health the phones still had left!

Check out the product page and learn more about how the ProCharge works. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the ProCharge could add months to the lifespan of a smartphone battery!

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Arcade machines were overwhelmingly made by Japanese companies, which is why the standard they ended up using (JAMMA) was named after the Japan Amusement Machine and Marketing Association. This jam-packed PCB called the PARSEC Supergun allows using JAMMA PCBs outside of an old-school arcade cabinet. That means megafans of coin-op can play classics like the original Double Dragon II arcade game on a TV.

This is possible because of the aforementioned standard — though the games varied, the interfaces they used to connect to the display and controls remained the same. This allowed, for example, Donkey Kong machines to be turned into Donkey Kong Jr. machines. The nickname given to this type of device in the arcade community is a “SuperGun” — thus the name PARSEC SuperGun.

This compatibility is made even more convenient for home use with the PARSEC. All it needs is a standard ATX power supply, the JAMMA board you want to play, some sort of compatible input (Neo Geo controllers work), and a sound/composite display output. Presto! You can impress your friends by having the real deal running in your living room, and not an emulated machine like most modern cabinets use. It seems that customers love it too, as this product has a 5-star review rating on Tindie!

Tindie seller Low Budget have even included optional “hats” for VGA (with both composite and TTL output options), as well as component video. The JAMMA connector has the Japanese characters thoughtfully printed on it to make setup easier — a very nice touch. The standard board also has buttons to put the game into service or test modes — so you can play for free! You can, of course, attach a coin collector if you want your friends to bring quarters every time they drop by.

Here is the designer showing off an earlier (v1.0) revision of the board:

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The Amiga 500 was an extremely popular personal computer that Commodore introduced in the late 1980s, and this replica Amiga motherboard could be the key to fixing broken ones! Commodore’s Amiga line of computers competed directly against both Atari’s ST line, and the IBM PCs and clones. Those who used Amigas truly loved them — in fact, there are still many Amiga users today. Some people are even still running bulletin board systems using Amigas!

The need for this replacement board arises from a common foe of many retro computers — the dreaded leaky backup battery. Most computers of the time had lithium rechargeable cells on-board to keep time and date, as well as BIOS options. Unlike modern computers which use easily replaceable CR2032 batteries, older machines would often use batteries soldered directly to the board, or odd batteries that were difficult to replace. To top it all off, many would forget about these batteries when storing their old computers. Twenty years later, they open the case and the acid has leaked, causing extensive, often irreparable damage to both the PCB and the components on it.

A PCB this size is no small feat and we commend Bob’s Bits for taking it on! He has also added many improvements, including better and more understandable silkscreen identifiers and quality-of-life improvements for the end user. If you’ve been looking to restore a damaged Amiga 500, this could be your ticket! Or it can be used to build the new and improved A500++ as seen in Bob’s video below. We haven’t seen many products focused on the Amiga computers, and we’re very glad to see this one; hopefully it inspires others to take a look at these awesome classic computers.

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