Maker Stefan Wagner has designed a instrument for testing USB Energy Supply (PD) and Programmable Energy Provide (PPS) energy provides and cables, providing a easy USB Sort-C connection at one finish and doubling as a useful benchtop energy provide: the USB PD Tester.
“The USB PD Tester is a monitoring and triggering gadget designed for USB Energy Supply,” Wagner explains. “It lets you check a variety of USB Sort-C PD energy provides and their corresponding cables.
“This instrument not solely shows the capabilities of the ability provide on an OLED but additionally lets you choose one of many out there fastened or programmable voltages for output on the screw terminal. With this, it may also be used to energy your tasks with varied selectable voltages and excessive currents, serving as a flexible variable energy provide.”
The compact board is designed to be easy to make use of: a USB Sort-C connector hyperlinks the tester to the ability provide, which boots and shows the out there USB Energy Supply modes on its OLED panel — voltage and most present.
Along with the USB Energy Supply modes out there, the gadget can even request the newer USB Programmable Energy Provide mode — with user-set voltage and present limits. Whatever the mode used, the chosen provide is handed by way of to screw terminals on the far finish — prepared to be used by exterior {hardware}.
The tester is constructed across the low-cost WCH CH32X035, a RISC-V microcontroller with built-in USB PD help. (📷: Stefan Wagner)
A key characteristic of the USB PD Tester is that it is constructed across the WCH Electronics CH32X035, a low-cost 32-bit microcontroller that makes use of the free and open supply RISC-V instruction set structure. Regardless of being out there in small-order amount for round 30¢ a chip, the microcontroller additionally presents USB 2.0 and USB Energy Supply help — lowering the variety of elements required to construct the tester.
Design recordsdata, firmware, and a 3D-printable case for the USB PD Tester can be found on Wagner’s GitHub repository beneath the Artistic Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.