 Welcome to the show, it's me, John Park, and it is time for another JP's Product Pick of the Week. Here we are. I want to say thank you to everyone for stopping by over in the YouTube chat and in our Discord chat if you are somewhere else and you're wondering where the chatting is. Head to our Discord. You can go to adafru.it slash discord and you'll get an instant invite and you can join in on the live broadcast chat channel. So hello, Mike P, Rich, Sad, Todd, Bot, Zarnlin, OK, Yaron, Jim Hendrickson, Scott, D, B, me up. I never get that name right. And over on YouTube we've got Tackle the World and Antonina Makarova, welcome. And there's probably others and I'm sorry if I didn't call you out, but thanks for coming by. If you want to head over to the page where this week's Product Pick lives, head right there. You can go to this QR code. You can go to this URL. You will see that this very show is happening in a little window inside of the product page and the reason you'll want to be there is for the huge discount that's available right now during the live stream only. That discount just dematerializes after the live stream so you want to fill up your cart with good stuff and get some of this week's Product Pick if it's something you like. I'm not going to force anyone. But if it's something you like, you're going to like getting it at half off. So usually what I like to do is go and check out the new Product Pick video that LeMore did for the Product Pick. There wasn't one for this. This was a revision of a board and I don't think there ever was an original. I couldn't find it and I asked around and it just doesn't appear to exist. So I'm going to describe the Product Pick to you myself but we'll go in a weird order because what I'm going to do is look in my little mystery box here and reveal the Product Pick which is one of my favorite little USB chargers for LiPo batteries. This is it right here. It is the USB LiPo LiPoly Lithium Ion Battery Charger. So this is what you need if you want to charge up these types of batteries, right? So we've got a lot of different little batteries, especially some of these bigger ones. You might want a dedicated charger. Some of them you can charge with something like a feather that has a charging circuit. But for other battery projects you need some way to charge these up and this one is terrific. It can charge at up to one amp, usually I think it defaults at 500 milliamp charge rate and one of the great things about this is that has the, let me get the number on it right, what's the, yeah it's the microchip MCP73833 charging management chip on there and what that means is that it charges in three stages. It does a preconditioning, it does a fast charge and then it does a trickle charge. So this is a nice sophisticated charger and it has some pretty great features too. So you'll notice we have these JST connectors at the bottom so you can plug in your battery right down here. So that's the battery you're planning to charge. It has a mini USB which is actually, I love these. I don't know why we ever went to micro. Of course C is terrific too but here is mini USB which is a bigger, bigger than micro as you can imagine and easier to plug it in the right way the first time. So you see here we can charge from USB there. It tells us that we have power with a little red LED here and then this is indicator that is yellow right now that tells me this is charging and then when it gets to a full charge and it's just doing the trickle that LED turns off and we instead get the done or green LED to light up. Now we also have some other extra cool features on here. There are, there's a load JST connector so you can plug this into the thing that you want to control. So this can act as sort of an inline charger and power supply, almost like a little uninterruptible power supply, a little UPS. So we can plug something in. It will run off of, I think it's whichever is greater if it's the USB or the battery but when you unplug USB you're still, the load is still running. So this is a nice way to build a type of device that allows you to just plug it in, charge it when you need to and then unplug and be on the go. Now for connecting up to devices you can use this load JST but you can also use some of the breakouts that we have here. In fact, let me get a little closer to the board and refocus, oh I passed it, pretty good right there. That looks good. So let me find a little something to point with here. So you'll see here on the left side we have breakouts for the load. So you can plug in one of these little connectors that comes with it. We have a little JST cable, in fact if I show you a little product photo here you'll see. That's what comes with it. So you can plug in that JST connector cable to those load breakouts. We also have breakouts for the status LEDs which I'll show you those are low by default so you'll hook up the cathode side of an LED to each of those, it's the charge and the done and then to power which I would use this plus on the DC inside of it. And then we have a battery connector too. So if you have a battery that you want to have permanently in a project and you don't feel like connecting it in through this JST if you want to cut wires and solder it in you could use that as well. It's pretty nice and compact and you can imagine depending on the type of battery you're using you can make a little holder for it or use some double stick foam tape to connect things up. So something like this could end up being the little package that you have to plug and play with. Now let me show you a little demo of one in action. So here is one where I've soldered on the connector for load so I can charge something up or power something rather. So here I have a circuit playground express and you'll see if I plug a battery in over here let me zoom out just a bit I don't trust the autofocus so I've got to refocus that there we go. So if I have a battery plugged in you'll see that immediately powers up the device so I have a circuit python or circuit playground express running over here. Now if I want to start charging this I can just plug in and it won't interrupt anything you can see the power still running over here there's no hiccups there and now we are driving this either off of available battery power or over the USB it's never going to turn that device off and then on this one I've actually added some headers just to make it easy to play around with external LED. So let me let's unplug this for a second so you'll see here I've got a funny little sort of circuit sculpture of a couple of LEDs and a resistor running to that positive DC power so you can see here I've now extended essentially the charge LED and the done LED I think I have a battery that might be close to fully charged so we should see this one oh what have I done it's it's struggling I think that battery is actually a little loose okay you can see that one go to done so it's now in trickle charge mode the little green LED there as well as my extended LED there is letting me know and the reason you might do this is if you have mounted this inside of a case for a sort of semi-permanent installation then you might want to know on the outside if you have completed your charge or not and then you can unplug and be on the go so let's see let's head on over to the product page here to check it out and these are normally $12.50 let's reload we are now at $6.25 maximum per customer you don't need a coupon code or anything you can just head right here throw it in your cart off you go remember get those before the show is done because then the price will return to normal yeah by the way someone noticed see Grover noticed that I didn't have any yellow LEDs so I put some capton tape over a white LED make make yellow gave me that nice amber thanks for noticing I love amber LEDs are the best LEDs so here you can see this is the product page it talks about some of this the information specifications for this so yes a 500 milliamp charge current which is adjustable using where'd it go here unplug one of these using the little slot there we have we can plug in a you can solder in an LED I think it's a 2k sorry resistor can plug in a resistor there I think it's 2k by default if you plug in a 1k resistor then it will allow up to the full amp and then if you put in bigger resistors you can drop it down to 100 milliamps at the bottom end and the reason you'd want to do that is if you go up to a higher charging current on a battery that allows it so check the battery stats and it's best to use batteries from Adafruit for this or know really well that you're getting the same kind because some especially ones who buy an Amazon may have the polarity reversed on that little JST connector and you don't use those that can be bad but if you look at our batteries you will see some will say that they have a maximum charge current of let's say 1200 milliamps and that's fine to go up to the full one amp on this some will say that they require lower and then you probably want to leave it alone as you go up to higher charge currents you may reduce the life of the battery but of course you're charging it faster so this one here for example this is a 2000 milliamp hour battery I think you can charge this in about four hours with a 500 milliamp current so you could reduce that I don't know if it scales linearly I don't know if it goes in half if you go up to the the one amp but when it gets to that fast charge portion of it it'll be dumping more power into it let's see it also mentions the different connectors you have there's also a support for a thermistor so we just have a resistor soldered in there right now but if you had either a battery that had a thermistor to measure temperature built into it and a separate wire you could plug that in or you could potentially run an external thermistor onto your battery to allow it to monitor temperature and I believe it in the in the chip data sheet which we'll take a look at it it'll let you know at what temperature it will shut it down let's see that's about it yes so then if we click on this little data sheet eagle cat pcb files fritzing objects here in the tutorial you can then click on the data sheet and you'll see here this is the microchip mcp7 sorry 73833 and they mention the typical applications you'll find this chip inside of cell phones cameras bluetooth headsets usb chargers and so on so it's a whole management chip there's no microcontroller on here other than this chip itself this chip does all of the management of the charging and it's a good one uh so let's see any questions over in our discord where did my uh i've lost my discord window i have there you are let me bring that up let's see um i have lots of problems with the connectors on lipo batteries says rich said yeah so you could potentially depending on on the type of thing you're doing you could say the heck with it with these cut that one at a time don't don't bridge that uh and solder those into the battery um pins on the board there so you're not dealing with that you also make things a little more compact than depending on what you're trying to build this into uh let's see yeah it's an early product 25 is it 259 i think that's right yeah 259 so this is version 1.2 so there was a version 1.0 uh that was uh discontinued this was revised so this one goes back a ways i'm not sure when the 1.2 came out actually that could be part of the problem why i couldn't find a a new new new video uh let's see uh any limits on the incoming power pads i believe six volts uh it's is is the maximum yeah it's designed for um essentially the five volts of usb but it can be a little higher so i believe the limit on this is um the uh six volts which is i think indicated in the pinout of the um product page as well as here on the data sheet so you can check there and see what the the maximum is uh yeah seven volts is the maximum on the chip that may be a little lower or we might just be um helping you be cautious about it here so uh yes but it is designed for for uh usb as the incoming thank you for the question dave smith uh all right well i think that's going to do it this is um my favorite little charger for keeping these types of batteries going i have a couple of them around the workshop i keep batteries plugged into them and they are also great for integrating into a project where you want to have power recharging uh mobile usb to plug it in and keep the thing topped off or just run it directly off of the usb when the battery is low uh so there it is that is the usb lipo battery charger and i put a hanger on in advance this time how about that uh all right that's going to do it for this week thank you everybody so much i will see you next time bye bye