 Welcome to the show. Oh my gosh, there's so many of me there. There I am. Just one now. Here we go. Hey, welcome. It is time for another episode of JP's Product Pick of the Week. Thank you all so much for stopping by. We've got some people over in our chats on YouTube, as well as the Discord. I just got distracted because Futari asked, are you mouthbeat boxing that live? No. That would be cool, though. Yes, it is actually Lars. Fantastic mouth drummer. Lars. What's Lars up to, anyway? He's back there chilling. So we've got a really hot product pick of the week this week. But before I go there, let me just send you on over to the site if you want to check it out. That is the QR code. And that is the URL for the product pick of the week. We have a tremendous 50% off discount going this week. And you can watch this show inside that product page. So head on over there. And so you know, you don't need a coupon code for this discount. 50% off, just put it in your cart and go. There's nothing else to do other than get it done before the end of the show or before we run out. But I think we have plenty. I heard from Tom we have plenty of these in stock. So you should be good up to 10 you can get depending on your big, big plans. So before I go into any more detail on this, let me have Lady Aida jump back a little bit into the past and tell us all about it. Take it away, Lady Aida. We spin of one of our favorite old products, product 390. One of the first ones we've made that's a really old product ID was our USB DC solar charger. And it's done us very well for many years. But I wanted to upgrade it first up because I wanted to put USB-C on it, but also want to see if there are some other chips that had come out in the meantime that could improve the capability of a universal charger. So what I did is I found the BQ24074, put on a breakout board with 2.1 millimeter DC jack, USB type C, two JST outputs. And this is a really nice universal charger. So let me tell you what it can do. You can use any DC power from 5 volt to 10 volts. So that's higher than our previous breakout, which maxed out at 6. So you can go up to 10 volts. It also has input protection up to 28 volts. USB type C connector makes it easy to plug in power from any wall adapter or computer. It'll use 5 volts off of that. If you want, the D plus and D minus pins are available also, so you can chain this into a dev board. The output, there is a charge port. The charge port can charge up to 1.5 amps, which is pretty high. Very handy when you've got one of those 2,000 or 3,000 or even 6,000 milliamp hour batteries. You want to charge it a little faster. This will do 1.5 amp charge rate. You can also set it to 1 amp or a 0.5 amp, or if you want, just cut the jumpers all together and put in your customer resistor. The output is load shared. So if you plug in the battery into the charge port, the output port will always have no more than 4.4 volts on it. And it will automatically use the USB or DC power if that's available, and only supplement it with battery power if you end up drawing more current than that's available from DC and USB. So basically, it tries to not drain your battery. If you have a USB or DC plugged in, your load will never be higher than 4.4 volts, so it's good for 3.3 volt linear regulators. It's also good for up to 5 volt boost converters. It's a nice voltage. And you'll have automatic load sharing up to 1.5 amps. It's got an optional thermistor input. If you want to use a thermistor, there's a power good LED. There's a charge LED. Best of all, it works with solar without needing any extra capacitors or anything. It's got a built-in capability to automatically reduce the amount of charge current so that the voltage doesn't collapse. It's like an input dynamic power path thing that's built into this charger chip. So if you use a solar panel, I just plugged one in, it'll automatically draw as much current as it can, basically kind of like a max PowerPoint type thing before the voltage dips below 4.5 volts. So you get the most current output. It's nice and stable, doesn't oscillate. So this is a great universal charger. Even though it works for solar, you don't have to use it with solar. DC power, 9 volt, 5 volt, USB-C, all works with it. So it's like an all-in-one, everything you ever wanted to charger. Yes, that is in fact our product pick of the week. Let me jump down here and get one myself to check out. Look at that lovely little guy. Product pick of the week this week, it is the BQ24074 USB DC and solar battery charger. Did I get that name right? 24074, I think I did. So that's the chip on there and this is a really great charger for a whole bunch of different uses. So you may not be sure exactly what your needs are gonna be for battery charging and this will probably take care of it. So here I've got a typical LiPoly battery and what I can do is plug that into the charging side. So there's a little indicator on there on the silkscreen, this is LiPo. So if I plug this in, this is now ready to be charged over USB. It's got a USB-C on there, plug it in and it is off and running, it's charging. You can go anywhere from, I think it's four to 10 volts DC, plug that right into there and it'll go off of DC, so a wall wart or some other barrel connector that you have going to DC. And then the super cool feature of this is of course solar. So here I've got a nice big voltaic brand solar panel and it has just been so hot out that it's really nice to know. You can at least use that blasted sun for something, which is plug it in and get some solar. Now I'm not going to get any in here in the workshop, but you can imagine, put that out in the sun, kind of hide this in the shade so you don't overheat things and this is off and running and charging. So a couple of other features I wanted to show. Let me go to a down shooter here and I'll just put a little me in the corner. So zoom out just a little bit. Here's a typical setup. Besides using this to charge, you can use this with something like a power boost in order to get five volt USB out of it, right? So this is charging, could be, I think this is a six volt cell, but you can, like I said, go anywhere up to around 10 volts with your input. You'd get five from USB. It's charging up this battery and this battery wants to give out 3.7. So this second JST connector here allows you to hook up something that wants that 3.7 volts off of the battery. And in this case, I'm going to plug in one of our little USB power boosts. So this is now converting whatever's coming off that battery or whatever's coming over the USB or DC if it's sort of a more stable and better supply than the battery. So it's kind of a continuous supply. And now I can plug some USB whatever into it. So you could charge a phone off of here. In this case, I've got one of my little Korg NTS-1 synths plugged into here. And so now, right, I've got a USB device. I'm in the sun. I'm charging. I'm running this off of here. I'm charging the battery. So I'm running off of a stable supply. And then we could come along and say, oh, you know what, let me plug in a USB-C. Come in, grab a USB-C, plug that into there. And now the source isn't the battery. It's actually this USB. Unplug that. And you'll notice that whole time my device stayed powered on. So there's no dip there, which is great. So there's a few other features on here. Let me get a little better camera there. You can unplug that there. We have, you don't need it, but if you're a real paranoid about it, you could put a big charging capacitor there. And then we have jumpers for choosing your charge rates. So depending on the size and heft of the battery, you can pick different charge rates. You can charge them faster. It's also got some solder points for a temperature monitor through MISTER. So you could put a temperature probe there. And depending on your monitoring situation, you could use a microcontroller to monitor. So let me jump over to the product page again for this. So you can see here, there it is, right now $7.48, which is really great for a universal charger like this. I'll refresh it. There we go. If you check out the links and the specs in here, you will get down towards the bottom, of course, a learn guide link because we don't wanna leave you hanging. So if you click on this, this will tell you everything you need to know about the device, specifications, the pinouts, how to hook it up, how to prep it for use. And you can see there's also some ideas on your panel preparation. So a lot of these panels use a smaller little plug. So we sell a couple of different adapters. This is a little right angle adapter that gives us the solar panel to DC jack that we need. And there's also a little pigtail version that you can see there on that site. Whoops, there goes a battery. Depending on the cell, some older ones needed you to do a bit of preparation, but I think all the panels that we sell now don't require that. Plug them directly in. And there's the array of panels that we sell. So you can see there's a bunch of different sizes and prices depending on your needs, probably not gonna get far with this little 40 milliamp one. The brand of panel that we sell for a lot of those bigger ones is this one here, Voltaic. And this is a cool site if you're interested in learning more about solar charging and sort of in the field operation of your devices. So let's see what else I wanted to do. I did wanna show a slightly more advanced use case that I had put together. So let me zoom out here and I'll refocus a bit so that we can see this. There we go, that's pretty close. So in this use case, I was going directly into the power boost converter. I set up a monitoring version of this and I put it in a little waterproof case. It's kind of disassembled now just so I could get this out to show you today. But the idea with this one is that I'm doing a LiPo charging monitor. So I'll pass my output of the charger into this little monitor and then you can see I've got a little cutie pie in there along with an OLED so I can get updates about the status of the battery. And then I've got a, this is a different power boost here and instead of a USB plug directly connected to it, I ran a USB plug out of the little cable gland on this waterproof case and I added a little power switch for the whole thing. So if we plug this in and power this on, you'll see LiPo gauge on here 4.1 volts and 82% charge. So that's telling me the status of the battery and then if we go out in the sun, presumably, you'll, if we're not drawing much current from the battery, you'll see that start to go up and you could get more sophisticated with that adding other types of monitoring, including temperature to that. But all of this doesn't look at right now, but all of this fits inside of there and there's a little sort of water resistant top that can go on there. So with all of that, we get solar panel, a USB pig tail there and an on off switch to power on and off the whole device. So let's see if there's any questions in any of our cats here. Sorry, YouTube, I wasn't checking you because you got hidden by a window. When you say power boost, do you mean power boost 1,000 basic? I'm actually, I have the 500 on here. You could do the 1,000, I think with, as Lamar mentioned, cutting a trace or changing a resistor, you can get 1,000 out of that. That guy right there, even though I think it's maybe rated for less, I think that works pretty well. Yeah, the one I have, I think in both of these cases that I'm using is a 500, but that's actually just, because that's what I had on hand. So I think you could go up a little higher than that. And there's a really detailed, I'll say if you wanna dig into that more, don't take my word for it. If you head back to the learn guide, there's a, this design notes section has a lot of info about how this type of chip works for solar charging. And I believe some of the minimum and maximum specifications for voltage and current. So, yeah, David, I found it, the PowerBoost 500 charger. That's the one I'm using right there. That's obviously gonna be slower for charging some devices, but I found even plugging in my iPhone 12 into that PowerBoost running off of a battery in this solar charger, it was able to charge the phone. It just wouldn't be as fast as a 1000. I think some devices like an iPad just won't charge. They require like two amps to even think about it. So, let's see, any other questions? Yeah, that's right, I'll never run out of battery now. Or at least Lars won't. Yes, this is designed for a single-lipo cell. All warranties are void if you start hacking your batteries. Be careful with that. All right, good. Okay, so I think that covers it. Let me know if you have any other questions in either of the chats, but if not, we will wrap things up. Oh, hold on, my software got glitchy there for a moment. Stay together with it. All right, hopefully you're still hearing audio and that didn't go away. Good. So, let me see if I can fashion a quick little hanger for this out of one of these cables. I'm always thinking of that a little late. There we go. So, product pick of the week this week, it's the BQ2407 for universal charger with DC, USB, and solar. That's gonna do it for another episode of JP's product pick of the week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please tune in tomorrow for 3D Hangouts and Show and Tell, Ask an Engineer after that. And then on Thursday, I'll have my workshop show. Friday, we'll have Deep Dive with Foamy Guy. So, that's gonna do it. Thanks everyone for stopping by. I will see you next time. Bye-bye.