A Bench Power Supply From a Drill Battery

One of the most essential tools in every electronics lab is a power supply. After all, a circuit isn't going to do much of anything without some juice. Most people buy their first power supply from an electronics distributor. However, when you get a little bit further down the road, it’s time for a common rite of passage: building your own power supply.

If you need some tips on how to do that, electronics hobbyist Pro maker 101 just released a build guide for a very creative portable power supply. It draws its power from an 18-volt, 1,500 mAh drill battery, and only takes a handful of components to turn that into an adjustable, stable DC supply in the range of 1.5 to 20 volts.

To start the build, Pro maker 101 created some 3D-printed parts to snap onto the drill battery at the bottom, and to serve as the control panel at the top. These are connected together by laser-cut panels of clear acrylic that show off the internal hardware.

This hardware consists of an XL4015 step-down voltage converter, and an XL6009 step-up converter. A large switch turns the supply on or off, and a combination DC voltmeter/ammeter shows the voltage setting and the amount of current being drawn. A pair of potentiometers, which were modified for continuous rotation, adjust these variables.

Probes can be attached to the top of the unit via banana sockets to power your circuits. The device can also be switched into a mode that allows it to be used as an LED tester that reports the voltage level LEDs require for normal operation.

Making this power supply look nice surely took some work, but wiring up the components themselves wouldn’t take too much effort. If you want to dive deeper into this build, be sure to give the video a careful watch.