#2607 Various 3.7V Boost Converters

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:06]All right, what's on the bench?

[00:00:08]Uh it's a whole bunch of little DC to DC converters, uh different types.

[00:00:12]Uh This is one type. This is another type.

[00:00:16]Um that one goes over here.

[00:00:19]Um And then this is one I already had.

[00:00:23]Uh I just got these off of AliExpress.

[00:00:26]Just to see what which one I liked better.

[00:00:30]Uh this one is super super tiny.

[00:00:33]So I kind of like him. So these DC to DC converters are designed for 3.7 volts in and voltage out. Um so these are 5-volt only parts, so 3.7 in, which is a a battery, and uh 5 volts out. And these can be strapped.

[00:00:51]Um They can be strapped for 5, 8, 9, and 12.

[00:00:58]They come from the factory with 12-volt setting on them.

[00:01:01]And the way that you change them is very small.

[00:01:08]Very very small.

[00:01:10]So on the upper left of the board there's an A and a B. And there's these little zero-ohm resistors there, and you need to either have them in or have them out. And the little diagram on the back tells you what to do.

[00:01:22]All right, and then this one is an oldy that I've had, 3.7 and 5 volts out, and it's on an actual USB A.

[00:01:30]I've got some wires on it here so we can make contact to it. So let's uh This is these are the ones I want to test, but I haven't really tested this one actually before.

[00:01:40]So uh let me rearrange the camera a bit.

[00:01:44]All right. Uh so we are going to test this one.

[00:01:48]Uh this is my power supply, so I'm going to put 3.7 volts in and we get a we get a red it red LED.

[00:01:59]So it's probably outputting power, so I'm going to hook up our our DC to our DC load.

[00:02:07]And see if I can't make this all work without it falling on the floor. Long cables are always dragging things onto the floor. There we go. All right, so we're getting 5 Oops.

[00:02:23]We were getting 5 volts out. What happened my my uh There we go. Connections. All right, so we're getting 5 volts out, and I want to see how much current I can draw.

[00:02:37]Um We'll start with 100 milliamps.

[00:02:41]Uh 0.1, so 100 milliamps. We'll turn it on, so we're we're drawing 100 milliamps and it's outputting 5 volts.

[00:02:51]All right, let's try 200 milliamps. 4.

[00:02:57]4.96.

[00:02:59]Uh let's go ahead and increase it. Well, watch this.

[00:03:03]If it drops below Yeah, it's kind of dropping below 4.9.

[00:03:10]So 220 Let's see what happens at 2 Yeah, 4 So Maybe 200 milliamps. I'll call it 200 Yeah, maybe 220 milliamps is what this one does, okay? Before it droops. It droops a little bit too much.

[00:03:28]So that's what that one does.

[00:03:31]Uh let's see here. We'll turn this off.

[00:03:35]I want to make sure I zero everybody so I don't blow anybody up. Okay.

[00:03:40]So the next one we're going to try is uh the tiny little guy.

[00:03:47]And he's supposed to output uh 5 volts as well.

[00:03:54]Uh so this one's ground. Let's see here, which one is V in?

[00:04:02]V in is this one.

[00:04:05]And we will hook up our load over here.

[00:04:13]And oh I need six hands.

[00:04:19]All right. Oops.

[00:04:20]Something happened.

[00:04:23]There we go. All right.

[00:04:26]So we have 5 volts out as we should. Oh, and I have I didn't turn it off. We were just drawing 100 milliamps. At 100 milliamps it's working fine. Let's go ahead and Yeah, 5.1 5.01 at 100 milliamps it's 4.99. That's good.

[00:04:41]Uh let's try 200 milliamps.

[00:04:45]Enter.

[00:04:47]Things are fine.

[00:04:49]And let's see if we can go up here.

[00:04:52]We're still at 4 Oh, there we go.

[00:04:53]Starting to drop a little bit.

[00:04:55]Let's go up. 4. Oh, it's still doing really well. This one's regulating really really well as we go up in current.

[00:05:03]Hasn't dropped below 4.95. 4.95 Yeah, yeah, right. Still doing well. Oh, there we go. 275 milliamps. Wow, that's pretty good.

[00:05:13]And that's probably failing there. So 275.

[00:05:19]Yeah, 275.

[00:05:21]Let's see what happens at 3. Oh.

[00:05:24]It crowbarred.

[00:05:25]So it's got current protection in it, so I like that.

[00:05:30]Uh let's turn this off. Let's go back to 0.22 amps.

[00:05:37]And we'll turn that on. Yeah, see at 0.22 it's fine.

[00:05:42]Let's see here at 0.25. I set 0.25.

[00:05:46]Enter.

[00:05:47]Yeah, 2 and 1/2 it's fine. Let's do 275.

[00:05:52]275.

[00:05:57]275 it's doing good.

[00:06:00]And then let's go up a little bit. 275 276.

[00:06:06]280.

[00:06:11]288.

[00:06:14]290.

[00:06:18]Oh, right there.

[00:06:20]It tripped.

[00:06:21]Yeah, interesting.

[00:06:24]Okay.

[00:06:26]I set but uh Let's put the I set back down. Okay. So that's the little guy. I really like the little guy. Point Yeah.

[00:06:36]Quarter quarter of an amp. Yeah, he's super super tiny. I like him.

[00:06:43]All right, and then we'll try this big one here.

[00:06:47]That's a 12-volt, so it'll be a little bit different, but let's go ahead and see how he goes.

[00:06:53]Output.

[00:06:54]Let's hook up our input.

[00:06:57]Our input voltage.

[00:06:59]3.7.

[00:07:02]Oops, dropped my lead.

[00:07:04]Okay, and I got a green a blue light on me.

[00:07:08]A blue light. Let's hook up our Let's hook up our DC load.

[00:07:15]And Oh, there we go. 12.1 12.15. Okay.

[00:07:21]So if we did the calculation before, if we had 5 volts um at uh 0.25.

[00:07:34]So at 12 it'd be maybe less than half of that, so maybe around 0.1. Maybe this one will do 0.1.

[00:07:42]So yeah, we still have that set. We'll turn it on.

[00:07:46]There we go. 12 volts at at 0.1 amps.

[00:07:50]That's good.

[00:07:52]Let's ramp him up.

[00:07:55]Watch I'll I'll see if it goes Oh Oh Wait a minute. We just crowbarred.

[00:08:00]Oh, that was fast. We're Okay, so let's go back to Let's go back to uh 0.12.

[00:08:12]Turn that back on. Oh, he's okay. Oh.

[00:08:14]No, he crowbarred. He crowbarred.

[00:08:18]So we'll go back to 0.11.

[00:08:21]0.10. 0.110.

[00:08:24]All right.

[00:08:25]Let's turn that on. Okay, he's okay there. So now we'll creep up on him.

[00:08:29]0.11.

[00:08:32]And we'll wait for him to crowbar.

[00:08:35]I love that they have protection built into them.

[00:08:53]0.129.

[00:08:55]0.13.

[00:08:57]Oh.

[00:08:58]0.13.

[00:08:59]All right. So Yeah, that's pretty healthy cuz it's at 12 volts, right? So we're getting quite a bit of watts out of it.

[00:09:08]A little over 1.2 watts.

[00:09:33]All right, just a quick little video. I wanted to see what I got in the mail.

[00:09:37]Um you know, you buy these things, you know, 10 at a time, and they they don't even singulate the boards. They just uh they just give you all the parts on the boards here.

[00:09:47]So they came I snapped off a couple already, but uh Yeah. So this one I got six of these, so Um but I got 10 of these, right? Oh, 1 2 3 4 5, yeah.

[00:10:02]10 of these, six of these, and they're they're dirt cheap.

[00:10:06]They're all basically the same.

[00:10:08]Um almost the same size inductor on everybody.

[00:10:14]And this one says I'm too small.

[00:10:20]>> [clears throat] >> Let's see. This one says Oops, upside down.

[00:10:27]This one says uh 47R, so probably 4.7 microhenries, millihenries, microhenries. Probably microhenries.

[00:10:36]And this one says 4. Yeah, so the same Oh, that's the same there.

[00:10:42]Uh what What's this one here? Oh, this one's different.

[00:10:45]Yeah, these are 2.2.

[00:10:48]So, and more Yeah, so these These guys here are much bigger spool, right?

[00:10:57]Uh much bigger much bigger inductor.

[00:11:02]All right. So, let's let's do the math.

[00:11:06]Um if we had 5 V at a quarter quarter of a uh amp, we were getting 1.25 W, and if we had 12 V and we had about one one Oops.

[00:11:25]We had 12 V, so we had about 0.12 um or 1.4 W. So, they're pretty close in wattage.

[00:11:34]Uh the other thing uh that's interesting in these is uh this particular one, it has a heavy-duty inductor, and it has a heavy-duty uh DC-DC converter part. It has a uh These are uh I forget the number of these, but they're like a uh These have a power tab on them, so you get a better heat sinking.

[00:11:54]Um these guys here have a tiny little part that's an SO6, SO SO23-6 uh with nothing else on them. So, they see it say, "Oh, this must be much, much better." But you know, the later versions of FETs have just no ohms in them, right? The on resistance is just almost nothing. So, you can get away with little tiny plastic packages with no heat sinks in them.

[00:12:18]And uh uh I did put a thermal camera on these.

[00:12:22]And the only thing that gets hot is the diode. Haha. The rest of the circuit doesn't even get hot. Uh the diode just gets up to like uh like 35° C, like nothing. But it's the diode that gets hot in these things. I didn't expect that. Um yeah. It's interesting.

[00:12:45]>> [music]