 It's key and a different present All right this week ladies from maximum integrated what is the NPI of this week, okay? This week's NPI is the max 2361 and you're probably wondering. What is this? Well, it's this little chip That is a boost converter and it's a specific kind of boost converter Well, what kind and love to tell you, but you know what date is today? No It's Earth Day. All right. It's a day today. This is this is an eco-friendly I feel like we can be a little better to earth on Earth Day I think so too and one of the ways we can be good to the earth is by using the sun That's right. Our best friend Mr. Sun Which is the source of all life on earth can also be used to power electronic projects and sensors and you can do that Using solar panels and so this is some this is a nice big solar panel cells that we've got in the shop And we also stock a solar charger kit. We actually have a two different ones and the solar charger kits that we've got They're specifically for larger panels I can see like physically quite large panels that would go on like a backpack or like a box or you know You see these outside. They they power you know air quality sensors and stuff on the street and This boost converter the max 202 036 1 2 0 261 is a specific type of boost converter that is designed for use with very small Solar panels to charge up a small lipo battery or a super capacitor And why do you need a special boost converter? Well, I love showing this curve of solar cell Information so this is one cell so a single cell has an open Voltage like if there's if there is if it's in the sun and there's no current being drawn from it It's about like 0.6 or 0.7 volts So if you start from the right of this graph and you Move up you'll see that as you draw As you draw more and more current The voltage like you know you quickly go up you can quickly as you start drawing current the voltage The current goes up the voltage moves to the left It goes down down down and then where you see that kind of like Line that kind of is going through all the curves That's the max PowerPoint because if you draw too much current from a solar cell What happens is the voltage collapses it goes you can see how flat it is the top It goes very quickly from about 0.5 volts to 0.43 volts And then you draw even a little bit more current and like boom you're at zero volts So you have to be very very careful about how much current you draw from a solar cell Because you want to be where that like that black line that's cutting through all of the curve The rainbow curves is that's your max PowerPoint. That's the point where if you are Drawing that much current from that much voltage You're gonna get the most power out of the cell if you draw less current you're losing power You're leaving power on the table if you draw any more Your voltage will collapse and you won't get any power at all. So right? It's very very sensitive and it isn't a fixed Voltage it depends and the fixed current it depends on how much sunlight there is on a very bright day It's gonna be that red curve on a cloudy day It's gonna be like that light blue curve in the middle, right? It depends on how much current you can draw So this boost converter and you can see on the left top left corner You can see there's a little like a diode thing with Ways coming into it. It's the inverse of an LED. It's it's a solar cell So you can connect a couple solar cells together and it's a very small chip It's very simple, but it's very effective it monitors the voltage and monitors the temperature You can program it over I squared C to give it Some details about how much max current and what the output voltage you want the boost converter to be And it will give you that output voltage and will also even wake up your circuit when it's You know gotten to a certain charge rates. I don't that'll keep your circuit from waking up Unexpectedly like before that the battery is fully charged You want to wait till the battery is fully charged and then you want your sensor to wake up and then maybe send You know blue just the energy data or Laura or cellular Wi-Fi And it's pretty efficient it does a really good job you can check it out They've got a lot of specifications for all the different, you know Boost peak currents which you can configure because you know you want to make sure that you don't overcharge your little battery as well It's just it's a delicate game right you want to get as much current out of the solar panel But you don't want to overwhelm your battery they make a really great eval board for this which I do recommend I'll show showed on the overhead later since I want to show in the very middle is the tiny little chip and And on the top right there is actually the solar cell so the solar cell here is is it looks a little bit like an OLED It's quite small to single looks like a single cell The eval board comes with like an FT 232 type dungley thing you plug it in and you can configure it I do recommend the eval boards because this chip is so small and you'll want to really configure it and play with it Before you decide on what kind of battery or super capacitor you go with It also has this cool mode with after you've set, you know use like the GUI to set the Specifications for what you want your boost converter to do Then you can go back and look at the registers to see what register values you programmed in which is like really smart because obviously Once you got it to where you want then you want to dump that data into your microcontroller To program it in and I want to mention actually usually the max PowerPoint stuff is handled by a microcontroller But when you're dealing with such small cells you don't have enough current to drive a microcontroller It'll use all of your power budget. So this is why you want the charger itself to do the max PowerPoint calculations for you Only thing about it that is you just got to watch out for I mean if you're if you're designed this into a product I'm sure you can deal with it, but it is a point four millimeter pitch BGA So personally that's you know for me I would have to go with like a four-layer board and you have to go with like very small vias Because point four millimeter pitch is small, but it's designed for wearables It's designed for very very small devices that have like micro Solar cells in them to let them charge and then perform sensor, you know readings and then transmit that data So it's small. It doesn't have a lot of pains It doesn't have even that much configuration required, which I really like they kept it simple and very straightforward It it's small. It's like it's a 1.6 by 1.2 millimeters. It's like a speck of dust You can get this on did you key? Mm-hmm. That's why we're doing Ion MPI. That's right. And the show Yeah Short real is there and the product number is there and every single week we do this We do also have video that ladies get a narrate. Yes, it's sped up twice as fast Okay I got something cool about that the reason I picked this video is check what they have is the radio on that dev board Does that look familiar? It does it does. That's our Laura breakouts. They use they're using one of our Laura breakouts So they just I like this video. We sped it up, but it basically just shows everything on the eval board It shows the super capacitor It shows this is that inductor because it is a boost converter So it's you do need one inductor, but it's pretty small It can be incredibly efficient and of course we're going at very very low voltages and very very low currents They also have a nice little animation video here Telling you it's a harvester. It's meant to be shaded and lit and it's it'll it'll turn on whenever there's enough Voltage and current for it to start charging That's why a super capacitor is really good in this case because it'll it can charge up very quickly It's not as sensitive as a lipo, but you know, of course you can use a lipo as well. And that's this week's IMPI