Increase Power Output Of Arduino With Regulated 5V

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi There :slight_smile:

So I did some research and found that the regulator on the Arduino nano can supply around 800mA, I assume that in reality this is quite a bit less if the Arduino's power consumption and power dissipation of the regulator is included.

My question is: If I supply a regulated 5V supply from an external regulator,

  1. Can I hook this up straight to my nano's 5V pin to power it?
  2. If so, will it cause any complications or adverse effects?

If I can power it from a regulated 5V, this means that any external sensors/devices powered with my 5V pin will be limited to my regulator's max output current and not the 800mA of the Arduino?

2

Your nano was designed to do exactly this, be powered via the 5 volt pin.
Other devices can also be powered from the same 5 volt power supply if they don't cause problems such as dropping the voltage very much.

1 Like
3

Not even close. That 800mA figure may be true with a huge heat sink, but on the Nano there is very little heat sink. The actual amount of current that the weak on board regulator can provide depends on its input voltage (from Vin or the power plug). The higher the input voltage the less current that the regulator will supply before overheating and, hopefully, shutting down.

Supplying the Nano from an external well regulated 5V supply is actually very wise.

4

and you can use a switching regulator for greater efficiency.

5

In this case, you should be more careful in choosing a power source.
If the external supply voltage exceeds 5.5V, you can damage the controller

6

Yeah, I plan on using a LM2596S with its complementary components to regulate a 5.29V and place a schottky diode at the output with a voltage drop of 0.4V @ 1A.
So I think my Voltage will be around 4.9V

7

You are apparently echoing a quite absurd comment that appears somewhere on the patently unhelpful Arduino site.

This comment is apparently directed at people with no understanding of electronics whatsoever. It is completely unhelpful. :roll_eyes:

8

Maybe you're right :slight_smile:
What do you say about the second phrase of my comment, is it also absurd?

In any case, if you consider my post toxic - we can notify the moderator.

9

No, not at all. But I think it is reasonable to expect people to understand that a system which specifies that it operates on 5 V (if you can get past the misleading information on the Arduino site) should be supplied with 5 V. At least within 10% either way.

My mains power supply is nominally 240 V. A little higher than the European 230 V standard. Adding 10% makes it 265V and people understand that beyond this, bad things are likely to happen.

Actually, the 5 V is not critical for an Arduino, 4.5 V or three (alkaline) cells such as "AA" is a perfectly appropriate power supply and very suitable for experimentation. Computers generally have a 5 V supply, at least for many parts, so regulated 5 V is a perfectly reasonable expectation - that is the USB supply voltage at least until you load it.

Incidentally, the maximum specified operating voltage of the ATmega328 is actually 6.0 V.

Why would you imagine that? :thinking:

10

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