Fuse Breakout Board Hookup Guide

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Contributors: bboyho
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Example

High Current Power Supplies

The inspiration for designing this board came after reading Hackaday's article: The Engineering Case for Fusing Your LED Strips. For power supplies with high current output, they'll simply keep pouring current to your load. This can damage your circuit and present quite a fire hazard. Placing the fuse close to your power suppliy's output can protect your circuit in case anything happens down the line. In this case, we'd want the fuse to blow out and disconnect the power to the rest of the LEDs. If you are using multiple LED strips off of one high current power supply, you would simply divide the current for each LED strip section.

Fuse Placed Between Large Power Supply and the Rest of the System

Low Current Power Supplies

If you decide to use a resettable PTC fuse with low current power supply, you could place it right after your input voltage. Below is an example schematic with the PTC placed between the wall adapter and voltage regulator. Placing a PTC fuse with the breakout board when prototyping is useful if you need to quickly test the setup before including it in the final design.

PTC Fuse Before Voltage Regulator

PTC fuse used in the design of the Breadboard Power Supply Kit.

Below is an example of placing a PTC fuse between the USB connector and microcontroller.

PTC fuse Before Microcontroller

PTC fuse used in the design of the RedBoard Qwiic