Power Supply Active Load Tester – Open Source Open Hardware project

I’m working on a new weekend project that will be released as soon as I finish the Windows application and it will be released as open-source open-hardware project. The uber-cryptic title stands for “Power-supply Active Load tester”.

Recently I was in need for a simple device that will draw reasonably precise amount of current from my power supply unit under test and read the voltage and current draw. There are a lot of schematics and products that do just that, or you can do this just with two digital multimeters, op-amp, mosfet and potentiometer and that will probably work just fine, but I wanted to create my own version and try to improve it. 🙂

[UPDATE]

The project has been released as Open Source Open Hardware and all of the necessary information is located on this page and also on GitHub. 🙂

If you don’t want to hear how I got this idea and why I did this project, you can skip this paragraph. 🙂

I had some weird issues with my Raspberry Pi model B that started to annoy me. It worked just fine until at random point it freezes the device, and I had to power off-on the device to get it started again. After some testing, probing, experimenting I deduced that the cause of this problem is the power adapter. The Raspberry Pi current draw peaked around 300-400 mA, and power adapter can handle that easily, but for some reason (seek more details about drifts in PS units) if Raspberry Pi tries to draw 300-400 mA from the power adapter for longer period of time, the voltage of the power adapter starts to drop significantly. Since I bought cheap 5V 1A power adapter, I was not surprised but that gave me an a idea for my weekend project.

I wanted to make a affordable and reasonably precise device that will be able to:

Draw constant current from the power supply under test

Measure current draw

Measure voltage of the power supply under test

Data logging and plotting logged data

Characterization of the power supply that is being testing

Communicate and be programmed over USB (via USB-to-UART)

Have an API so that you can read/write data from and to the device easily with 3rd party software

Device that can be easily upgraded, modded and change to be as versatile as possible for such device

You can see the device schematic below. This is the demo and proof of concept and keep in mind that I’m using the components that I have laying around, although all of the components are easily available. I’ve built my own PCB and tested the device and it works just like I wanted.

PAL Tester Schematic v0.6

What I would greatly appreciate at this point:

I’m experienced programmer and I will create the Windows application that will be able to communicate with the device and the application will be written in vb.net, c# or python. However if you are interested in helping out, you can and in a lot of ways:

Creating an application for Windows/Unix that to communicate with the device and graph logged data

Reviewing code on GitHub

Requesting features and giving suggestions for improvements

Reviewing the device design

Spreading the word about this project 🙂

Suggesting a better name 🙂

Contribute to this project in any other way you can/want 🙂

If you wish to get more information about this project, please contact me via email, Skype or any other way you find most convenient for you.

Further documentation (API, Schematic, Source-Code, UART communication samples and everything else) is available on request [mainly because I expect it to be tweaked few times before initial public release]