What can I do with a BooSTick?

I'm glad you asked!

Prototyping: Since BooSTick plugs right into your breadboard, you can use it for prototype power and testing. This clapper circuit requires more than 3.3V to run, and the BooSTick provides up to 5V!



Wi-Fi: Even Wi-Fi is possible with the BooSTick. The ESP8266 draws a bit of a current spike at some point in its operation, so a cap is required on the power supply to keep the BooSTick from dropping out during operation. With the cap, Wi-Fi runs great!

At 200 mA output, BooSTick can handle even the biggest Arduinos. Even if you're sloppy with power management in your code and you use a power hungry shield, you can use two BooSTicks in parallel to provide even more than 200 mA. Pictured is a Mega 2560 with terribly optimized code and an ESP13 Wi-Fi shield plugged into the top. Two BooSTicks allow me to telnet to a server in China!

LED lights: I've used the BooStick in a POV (persistence of vision) project where I needed an untethered power source to put my electronics in a bike wheel: https://hackaday.io/project/6470-multi-sensor-pov-light



Remote sensors: I used the BooSTick to power a TI RF2500 microcontroller board with a low power radio: http://www.ti.com/tool/EZ430-RF2500 with sensors attached to it. I needed to make sure the accelerometer I wanted to use for the POV light was in the right acceleration range so the wheel rotation wouldn't just max it out all the time. I used the RF2500 to take acceleration measurements and radio them back to my PC.







Specifications:

Voltage outputs:

3.3 V (with jumper installed)

Pull the jumper for a full 5V supply! (included)

Other voltages between 1.8 V and 5.5 V are achievable by tuning the feedback resistors. Specify different voltage if desired.

Current limit (with new batteries). This is intended to be a peak current or a pulsed current. A new battery will only last about 20 minutes at these levels before the output voltage drops more than 10%.

5V: 220 mA

3.3V: 320 mA

Run time:

5V, 50 mA: 6 hrs

3.3V, 50 mA: 12 hrs

Lower current/voltage generally leads to proportionally longer run time or more

Indicators:

Green power on LED

Red low battery LED

BooSTick is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/