Kickstarter – Quad Power Management Board Video Demo
Here is an off-the-cuff video done by Dr. John Shovic on the use of the Quad Power Management (QPM) Board in our new robotics project, SunRover. SunRover is a solar powered semi-autonomous robot designed to be jointly software and remotely operated.
Our new kickstarter for the QPM board is “Really, Really Useful Breakout Boards – Arduino/Raspberry Pi” and is located here:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/sunair/really-really-useful-breakout-boards-arduino-raspb
The Kickstarter contains two boards that are useful in Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects for robots, power supplies, solar powered systems and more. These boards are an inexpensive I2C 8 GPIO Extender and a Quad Power Management I2C Board.
The QPM board can be thought of as an I2C controller quad solid-state relay very useful in solar powered projects and robotic projects. The SunRover robot project uses 5 of these boards and will add a 6th for optional external sensors.
Come pledge and get a great discount on these new products.
SunRover Battery Stacker/Unstacker
Here is the video. Application description is below the video.
Quad Power Management Board and Battery Stacker/Unstacker
Applications of the QPM Board
Battery Stacker
To get the ~12V we need to run SunRovers motors, we need to stack 3.7V LiPo rechargeable batteries. It takes 3 batteries to get up to about ~12V.
The problem is that all of our Solar Powered Charging system is designed to charge 3.7V LiPo batteries. Our solution? Use two QPM boards to switch the batteries from a series to parallel connection and then charge the batteries from SunAirPlus. The QPM board even has two inputs per device. One with a protective diode and one with our. Perfect for our application.