Active Load – Sasa Karanovic

USB Power supply Active Load Tester or short PAL Tester is unit designed for testing the quality of the power supplies.
Idea was to create low-cost, precise device for simultaneous measurement of Voltage and Current drawn from the device under test. This is one of my weekend projects that I have decided to release to the public. All source files can be found on projects GitHub page.

Device Features:

Open Source and Open Hardware
Modular design, easy to understand and change/adapt to your needs
Uses widely available and off-the shelf components
Components Bill of Material is below $10
Integrated USB-to-Serial converter for easier interface with the device
API for communicating with PC
Recording Voltage vs Amps data and graphing the results
Easy to use

1 Comment

I’m working on a new weekend project that will be released as soon as I finish the Windows application and it will be released as open-source open-hardware project. The uber-cryptic title stands for “Power-supply Active Load tester”.
Recently I was in need for a simple device that will draw reasonably precise amount of current from my power supply unit under test and read the voltage and current draw. There are a lot of schematics and products that do just that, or you can do this just with two digital multimeters, op-amp, mosfet and potentiometer and that will probably work just fine, but I wanted to create my own version and try to improve it. 🙂

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Tag: Active Load

USB Power supply Active Load Tester

Device Features:

Power Supply Active Load Tester – Open Source Open Hardware project