5 Ways to Kill an Arduino (Video#115)

When powering an Arduino based command station from one single power supply with a track voltage of say 14 Volts, there is a risk that it will overload and burn the 5V voltage regulator on the Arduino board. The common way to avoid that is using separate power supplies for the Arduino and the Motorshield. The more elegant way is to internally generate the 5V from the higher VIN voltage using a stepdown convertor like the one integrated in the RedHat shield and explained in Video #99. More recently I designed a separate DCC AUX shield for that purpose as shown in Video #113. That design was straight forward and it seemed to work flawlessly – until I got news from a user that smoke was coming out of his Arduino.

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Table of Content 0:00 Welcome 1:20 Questions to answer 2:40 Root Cause Analysis 4:40 Root Cause 1: Startup Overload 8:00 Power driver review 9:00 Solution 1: Protection Diode 9:30 DC-DC Step Down Convertor Methodology 11:15 Root Cause 2: Startup Hesitation 13:40 Solution 2: Correct Capacitor Values 14:15 Root Cause Summary 15:30 Improper Wiring and Shortcuts 16:25 Concept Confirmation 18:06 Summary ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3zs_GemaBM