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Inductor Saturation Current Measurement Jig and Constant Current Dummy Load

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Background As I have only recently come to realize, inductor selection for boost converters is not a trivial matter at all. Every inductor I tried saturated way too early, causing progress for the SMPS Chronicles Boost Converter project to grind to a halt. After many frustrating afternoons, and several blown parts and melted breadboard holes, …

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SMPS Chronicles I: Chapter 4 – Inductor Shenanigans, Slew Rate Woes, and Why The Boost Converter Isn’t Boosting

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Yes, I was a lot more naive than I thought when I first dove into this project. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot that could go wrong with a boost converter if you try to implement one from scratch. In this article, I’m going to discuss a few of the main gotchas that really shattered my …

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SMPS Chronicles I: Chapter 3 – Basic Characterization of the Boost Converter

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The entire point of SMPS’s is that they are efficient. That, compounded with the fact that I started this experiment with the aim to better understand the design principles behind switchmode power supplies, meant that I couldn’t resist taking a few basic measurements to assign some numbers to the (very crappy) boost converter from chapter …

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SMPS Chronicles I: Chapter 2 – PWM Modulator, Power Stage and Error Amp

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With the addition of these 3 components, I had a fully functional boost converter! However, it is not without its (huge) caveats, and let’s just say that along the way, Murphy has paid me many, many visits. In Chapter 1, we talked about the sawtooth generator, which connects directly to the an opamp responsible for …

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Switched-Mode Power Supply Chronicles I: Op Amp Based Boost Converter

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The inspiration for this series of articles came from Microchip’s TB3103 and TB3104, which outlined the implementation of current mode controlled buck and boost converters using the PIC16F753’s internal analog peripherals, which include an operational amplifier, a comparator, PWM, etc. As a hobbyist, I’ve always found stuff like transfer functions, bode plots (the more complex …

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