Maker Ryan Walker, of Interrupt Labs, has teamed up with Protectli to design an open supply uninterruptible energy provide (UPS) — utilizing 12 18560 batteries to maintain DC-supplied units ticking over within the case of an influence outage.
“We have designed an open supply UPS that redefines the connection clients have with their electronics,” Walker claims of the system, the design and firmware for which is being made accessible beneath a permissive open supply license. “It makes use of 12 18650 upgradable batteries, an [Espressif] ESP32 to host an online server, [Raspberry Pi] RP2040 for basic management, GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output] to wire in exterior elements, relays, and extra.”
Whereas many UPS designs should deal with mains-voltage alternating present, Walker’s design opts for one thing easier: 12V direct present in, 12V direct present out — utilizing, neatly, two completely different sizes of barrel-jack connector so you may’t combine up which is which. Underneath regular circumstances, the enter energy flows on to the output — but when the enter energy goes lacking, the UPS mechanically switches to its financial institution of 18650 batteries till the enter energy provide comes again on-line.
The board has a choice of quality-of-life options above and past merely guaranteeing continued energy, together with an on-board 128×64 OLED show for native standing and an online server working on the on-board Espressif ESP32 module with assist for Community UPS Instruments (NUT) for monitoring and management.
The UPS concentrates on offering a secure 12V provide, avoiding the complexity of AC-to-DC-to-AC conversion. (📷: Protectli)
As an open-hardware system the firmware for each the ESP32 and the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontrollers are additionally being made accessible for customers to hack and iterate upon, ought to a characteristic be discovered lacking.
Extra info on the UPS design is on the market within the video embedded above, whereas schematics and supply code have been revealed to GitHub beneath the MIT license; extra particulars, and a hyperlink to be alerted when improvement is full and the industrial model is on the market, may be discovered on the Protectli web site.