Working on new driver/proto type

Like title says I'm working on a laser driver. One thing is I'm looking for a regulator with low drop out to be used on 1x 3v batteries to power blue-ray, red, etc... Anyone know of it? SMD, to 220, no problem...

Sorry, but you can NOT use a linear, no matter what dropout it have, for power a BR with a single 3V battery, cause the diode require more voltage of the one of your battery (5 to 6V)

You need to use a boost driver .....

HIMNL9 said:

Sorry, but you can NOT use a linear, no matter what dropout it have, for power a BR with a single 3V battery, cause the diode require more voltage of the one of your battery (5 to 6V)

You need to use a boost driver .....

Click to expand...

Boost alone will not work well since the input ALWAYS has to be lower than the output. Buck/Boost is what is needed here - believe me I've looked into this and it took me a fair while to find a suitable IC that would do one of the above, never mind both of them.

Switching is a whole different ballgame than linear.

^ LOL, i know ..... i'm making occasional experiments with some samples i got from Maxim and ON-Semi (when i find a bit of time between all the things i have to do ) .....

I think i found something decent (well, at least the better prototype gave me 480mA on an 8V drop dummy load from a 18650 battery, and can probably reach some more voltage and current), but is not stable as i want, i need to find different coils and probably need to redesign the pcb ..... those damn switching are extremely permalous about the pcb design

Anyway, is too few time that i'm trying with it ..... need also some long-run and stability over temp test, before share it (don't want to share a circuit that can risk to burn diodes )

ah like a transistor in the circuit . too bad dr lava has no schematic ;p

The schematic of lavadrive is not too hard to draw from a driver (anyway i cannot post it without explicit permission from drlava, cause it's his work, not mine) ..... that what is not easy is to work with the IC that he use (TPS63010) ..... it's a BGA package with 20 pins (yes, 20 pins, 5 x 4 grid array) all contained in a very small package of 2x3mm ..... the disposition of the pins and dimesions are these ones:



All the quotes are in mm, and as you can see, there is almost no way for use them in an hobbyst environment ..... this type of chip require industrial soldering with oven reflowing, and usually also with industrial mounts there's a certain part of errors and discarded pieces ..... just imagine to solder 0.20 mm pins in a grid array of 0.40mm spacing, including the ones under the device, using a normal hand soldering iron ..... a nightmare with a good 80% or more of failed and cooked chips :wtf:

hmmm im really wanting to make my own to just fit in an axis housing... but im trying to do cheap as i can and sincle ive had good luck with my uv exposure unit to make boards trying to figure if i can just make a single sided driver and not double... buck/boost chips are way expensive. ive searched about the lm3410 which might be the way to go. anybody have any luck? also thought of instead of desoldering resistors could just make a jumper... dunno but this little project when done will be cool. just trying go cheap as possible so i can have a demo unit. maybe if all goes well i can produce these things! im going to be interfacing the dc motors with an h bridge tied to a microcontroller . basically have the microcontroller send commands to the motors (might use a steppers) and turn the laser(s) on/off at given milliseconds.

Trust me, the cheapest way will be to go with the LavaDrive. The LM3410 is a viable solution, but only if you want to go through the steps designing the PCB, getting all the components (inductor, capacitors, a potentiometer, chip, diode), prototyping and soldering. By that point, you'll see that it was cheaper to go for the lavadrive (and the lavadrive will probably be more efficient and smaller too).