Ryan Ma's PD Micro Offers USB Power Delivery to 20V in an Arduino Pro Micro-Compatible Board
The PD Micro offers 5-20V of USB Power Delivery plus all the usual features of an Arduino Pro Micro including full breadboard compatibility.
Ryan Ma has launched a crowdfunding campaign for PD Micro — an Arduino-compatible, Pro Micro-style breadboard-friendly development board featuring USB Type-C Power Delivery capabilities.
"PD Micro is the first Arduino-compatible board with USB-C Power Delivery. The pins are compatible to Pro Micro," Ma explains of the design, which is built around the Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller operating at 5V and 16MHz and a TPS62175 DC-to-DC converter plus FUSB302 USB PHY. PD Micro allows you to control high voltage easily from USB-C Power Delivery. It’s useful for applications that require voltage higher than 5V — like motor control or a high-power LED.
"PD Micro is accompanied by our newly-implemented, simple, compact, USB-C Power Delivery library. This was written over the course of porting the code for PD Micro. We ended up writing a library completely from scratch. The result is a simple, compact, portable source code for USB-C device only application, which can be put inside ATmega328/ATmega32U4."
The PD Micro includes an Arduino Pro Micro-compatible pinout, plus screw terminals for the USB Power Delivery portion: Configurable using the bundled library, these terminals offer 5-20V output from a 5V USB Power Delivery-compatible power supply connected to the board's USB Type-C connector.
As a Pro Micro-compatible development board, the PD Micro also includes nine 10-bit analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) pins, 12 digital IOs, five ground pins, three VBUS pins connected to the USB Type-C power input plus one regulated 5V output from the TPS62175. Status LEDs are also provided for serial TX/RX plus five for feedback on the voltage and three for the current of the USB Power Delivery function.
Ma's PD Micro is now live on Crowd Supply, priced at $28. Delivery is slated for April 2021.