smôl Power Board AAA Hookup Guide
PaulZC Introduction
smôl is a new board format and, as the name suggests, they're really small!
The smôl Power Board AAA is an intelligent power board for smôl. It is designed to provide 3.3V power for your smôl stack from one or two AAA or AA alkaline (non-rechargeable) batteries. If you need a rechargeable solution, check out the smôl Power Board LiPo.
Each smôl board measures just 1.60" by 0.42" (40.6mm by 10.7mm). We made the boards just wide enough so we could squeeze USB-C and 16-way Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC) connectors on there. Some of the boards have components on both top and bottom layers which again helps keep the boards small.
smôl boards are designed to stack one on top of the other, using 16-way 0.5mm-pitch FPCs to provide the interconnect from one board to the next. Each board has an IN FPC connector on the bottom layer and an OUT FPC connector on the top layer. The boards stack in a zig-zag daisy chain; signals and power are passed from one board to the next up and down the chain through the FPCs.
Required Materials
As a minimum, you're going to need a battery holder or JST-PH cable to go with your power board:
The Power Board AAA is part of the smôl ecosystem. Why not pair it with one of the smôl Processor Boards and a Peripheral Board?
Don't forget that you will need Flexible Printed Circuits to connect your smôl boards together. You're going to need one FPC per board. Our 36mm FPC is the perfect length if you want the smôl boards to stack neatly, one on top of the other.
Need to do some prototyping with smôl? Or want to connect your smôl stack to a Qwiic board? The smôl Header is perfect for that:
Suggested Reading
This is the hookup guide for the smôl Power Board AAA. Click the button below if you want to find out more about smôl itself.
We recommend taking a look through the following tutorials if you are not familiar with the concepts covered in them: