Marco Tabini's ESPPD Pairs a USB Power Delivery Controller with an Espressif ESP32-S3 for Simplicity
This breadboard-friendly creation aims to take the guesswork out of implementing USB Power Delivery capabilities in your next project.
Maker Marco Tabini has designed a development board which aims to make it easier to work with USB Power Delivery (USB PD), combining a Power Delivery negotiation chip with an Espressif ESP32-S3 module to create the breadboard-friendly open source ESPDD.
"Taking advantage of [USB Power Delivery] isn't trivial, because the protocol is complicated and tricky to implement in software," Tabini explains by way of background. "This puts PD out of the hands of most hobbyists and hackers — which is a shame, because PD supplies are easy to procure and abundant, not to mention the fact that there are plenty of compatible power banks that could be used to simplify the design of high-power battery projects.
"My goal in designing the ESPPD," Tabini continues, "was to create a simple solution to this problem and couple it with an ESP32-S3 chip into an inexpensive but powerful package that makes PD easy to use and very affordable."
The ESPDD is a breadboard-friendly development board which pairs an ESP32-S3 — a system-on-chip featuring a dual-core Tensilica Xtensa LX7 processor running at up to 240MHz, 384kB of available static RAM (SRAM), and 8MB of on-module SPI flash, with variants available offering an extra 8MB of pseudo-static RAM (PSRAM) — with the WCH Electronics CH224K USB Power Delivery (PD) controller, capable of negotiating up to 3A of current at 5V, 9V, 12V, 15V, or 20V from USB PD-compliant power supplies.
"All but three of the ESP32's pins are exposed for use through the pin headers," Tabini notes of the module's capacity for communication with external hardware. "The board is compatible with Arduino IDE and PlatformIO out of the box, and can be programmed directly over USB. Outside of the USB PD functionality, it behaves just like a standard ESP32-S3 board, and all its functionality is available for you to use."
"If you choose to interface with the CH224K dynamically," Tabini continues, "I have included an easy-to-use library that takes all the guesswork out of requesting a voltage and checking the Power Good signal."
More information on the project is available on Tabini's Hackaday.io page, while design files and source code are published to GitHub under the permissive MIT license.
