Buck Converter

Class Project: Sophomore Design Group: 2 (Spring 19)

This project was an introduction to PCB design. This project was a major milestone for me personally as this sparked a passion for PCB design which greatly influenced the trajectory of my Undergrad and Masters program. I continued my education of the best practices for PCB design which allowed me to build many personal projects in addition to contributing directly to me securing an RA position in the Power and Electronics lab, my Masters capstone project ROS on the RSLK, as well as an RA position developing a Mobile EEG Device.

Skills obtained from this project:

  • Writing a schematic

  • PCB layout

  • Buck circuit theory

  • Basic soldering skills

  • Maintaining a Bill of Materials

  • Component acquisition

  • Component and PCB ordering

  • Time budgeting (order time)

In the end the project was a success as shown in the demo video at the top of this page. Looking back on this project although being simple, it taught me many skills that I used moving forward as well as teamed me up with some people that would turn out to be great friends and study partners for the years to come.

The goal was to obtain a preexisting USB car charger (brown PCB) and design a replacement PCB (green PCB) for the charger. We obtained the largest charger we could find in order to give us the best chance of success. In the end this proved wise since most teams were unsuccessful with their designs either due to their PCB not fitting, their design not operating, or logistical/time issues.

We were told which chip(MC34063A) to use and conveniently in the datasheet there was a example circuit for a buck converter. We designed the PCB and sent off for parts and PCB fabrication.

This was the first time that I needed to solder anything so there was a bit of a learning curve. Everyone on the team was able to soldered their own board and and then we tested. As this is a buck converter we used a 12V DC supply to replace our car battery and were successful in outputting a stable 5V DC up to 0.5A which was expected based off the MC34063A datasheet.