I seem to be on the road quite a bit these days. I have a trusty 10 year old light (weight) Toshiba laptop (original Li-ion battery) that is still going strong. It's amazing that a lot of their laptop use a 2.1mm barrel jack connector for power input. None of this fancy proprietary connector rubbish. The power brick that comes with it is also light in weight as it only has to supply up to 45W at 19V - but it does mean I need to carry a travel power adapter for it. I thought it would be fun to make up a small USB-C PD power board to supply my laptop. This means I can run my laptop from either a suitable USB PD power supply or a USB PD battery bank. As I was in Shenzhen, I picked up a Remax 140W USB-C PD power supply. This outputs 20V at up to 5A (100W) and will easily run both my laptop and USB-C Pinecel soldering iron at the same time + a USB desk light etc.
I found the
IP2701 USB PD IC on LCSC and made up a PCB so i could test it all out. It worked well, and with my DL150 electronic load I managed to get around 61W of power out of it before the re-settable 3A fuse kicked in. The fuse did get a toasty 90 degrees just before it cut in! This board can output: 20V at up to 3A, 12V at up to 3A or 5V at up to 3A. There is a 3 pole switch to select required output voltage.
- IP2712_USB-C_PD_Breakout_PCB_v0.1_sml.jpg (46.4 KiB) Viewed 4175 times
The next version of the board has a larger 5A fuse and a lower profile XT30 connector for the output power. This works well and I have been using it daily for over 3 months now. I use it with a nice USB cable that has a built in power display so I can verify that my laptop never pulls more than 40W of power. If the laptop battery is charged, then it usually only sips 5-10W of power while doing general work! This is all solder jumper selectable and comes preset to 20V output.
- IP2712_USB-C_PD_Breakout_PCB_v1.0_sml.jpg (81.74 KiB) Viewed 4175 times
I am in love with USB PD!