Portable Adjustable Mini Powersupply

As most of my project involve electronics of some sort, having a good power supply is essential to be able to meet the demand of different power requirements. So I built me a bench-top power supply from an old ATX power supply Unit (PSU) that worked (and still works) great. However I’ve recently noticed some limitations with having a full fledged bench top PSU.

Whenever I wanted to build or test something on the go I still had to resort to poor battery hacks and random power adapters that in best case worked poorly or worst case fried or didn’t fit my project. And since my PSU was way to clumsy to carry around in my man-purse or pocket I realized that I needed to build me a mini power supply unit (mPSU), kind of a travel power pack for your on the go power needs.

The requirements I had for this mPSU was that it had to be able to output adjustable voltage, a fair amount of current, be small and handy to carry around, be battery operated for total mobility and as a bonus I added a 5V USB output to be able to use this to power usb stuff or use as a power bank when needed. So in this Instructable I’ll show how I achieved this with cheap components from ebay and some random stuff I had laying around.

This instructable requires some soldering and understanding of simple schematics.