This adorable little board will come in very handy whenever you need a small amount of 5V power. It’s the size of a linear regulator, but it’s actually a mini-booster! Input 3V on one side, and get 5V at up to 100mA supply on the other. Perfect for use with battery-powered projects with 2 or 3 Alkaline, or a single Lithium battery. For big projects, you may want one of our PowerBoost boards that can give you a honkin’ 500mA-2A of current.
This booster uses a charge-pump topology, which makes it very compact and low cost. But it isn’t as efficient as a inductor-based boost converter. Charge-pumps always double the incoming voltage, and then regulate down. So yeah, not as efficient. So ideal for when you aren’t counting coulombs – or when your current draw isn’t terribly high.
You get one fully assembled breakout with an AP3602A and components, and a small bit of header. Give 3-5VDC on the IN and ground pins. Then you’ll have 5V on the OUT pin. The enable pin can be pulled low to disable the output.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
