Boost Converter

Yes, I was a lot more naive than I thought when I first dove into this project. Unsurprisingly, there is a lot that could go wrong with a boost converter if you try to implement one from scratch. In this article, I’m going to discuss a few of the main gotchas that really shattered my initial expectations. Inductor Saturation After the success of the kinda terrible boost converter back in chapter 3, I thought it’d be cool to aim higher and actually try to design something in a more proper fashion, i....

The good, and perhaps bad, thing about passions and hobbies is that the energy to zealously pursue them ebbs and flows as the days, weeks, months or even years go past. Just recently, I experienced a strangely strong desire to just go out there and design something again out of frusration over what we’re “learning” at university, so here we are. Preface: Why LCSC Because DigiKey/Farnell/RS wouldn’t give me free shipping until I spent tonnes of cash, and even then, the VAT here in the UK is just crazy… It’s times like this when I really, really miss being in Malaysia....

The inspiration for this series of articles came from Microchip’s TB3103 and TB3104 , which outlined the implementation of current mode controlled buck and boost converters using the PIC16F753’s internal analog peripherals, which include an operational amplifier, a comparator, PWM, etc. As a hobbyist, I’ve always found stuff like transfer functions, bode plots (the more complex ones), and SPICE to be really intimidating. I am aware of what these are, and why they are used in circuit design, but I’ve never really sat down and worked with them before, much less explore their nitty gritty details....

The entire point of SMPS’s is that they are efficient. That, compounded with the fact that I started this experiment with the aim to better understand the design principles behind switchmode power supplies, meant that I couldn’t resist taking a few basic measurements to assign some numbers to the (very crappy) boost converter from chapter 2 . I was going to build it out on a piece of perfboard first to reduce breadboard parasitics and to make sure that the intermittent connection issues I was having with my breadboard weren’t going to cause any issues down the line....