Skip to content

Increase LED current #46

@thejpster

Description

@thejpster

The LED current for the external case LEDs is a little low. On the Checkmate A1500 Plus case, the orange HDD light is OK, but the green power light is a bit dim.

If the LED forward drop is 2V, with a 1 kΩ current limiting resistor, that's 1.3mA. With a 1.7V LED it's 1.6mA. With a green or blue LED at 3.2V, we'll only pass 100 µA!

PCs will typically provide 5V for the case LEDs. Maybe we need to generate 5V stand-by (e.g. TPS7A2450DBVR 5V 200mA LDO), as well as 3.3V. We can switch LEDs powered from 5V by setting the STM32 pins to be open drain (i.e. GND or High-Z).

This also has the advantage that:

a) We can power the keyboard from the 5V SB, for keyboard power-on.
b) It moves the LED current off the 30mA MAX1615 (or we could just make this LDO more powerful...)
c) It makes moving to an ATX power connector easier, because they provide 5VSB.

We would control an ATX PSU with a nPS_ON signal - pulling that line to ground to start the PSU.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions