Powerboost 1000 in parallel?

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treedon
 
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Joined: Thu Sep 29, 2011 3:35 pm

Powerboost 1000 in parallel?

Post by treedon »

Greetings, I'm wanting to make a wearable device that contains a fair number of Neopixels, which are very power hungry.

Roughly: it will be around 60 neopixels in various forms, which I never expect to have all on at full brightness.

As a result I really need to do two things to my power source to get it running safely:
  • step up the 3.7v LiPo voltage to 5v
  • increase the suggested discharge rate to accommodate a large number of lights safely.
So my thought is to wire two powerBoost 1000s in parallel to my project (separately for the Leds) and it should the correct characteristics.
Image
edit: i now see the requirements for higher A batteries, so ignore the mAh in the graphic
is this crazy?

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Joined: Thu Feb 11, 2010 2:51 pm

Re: Powerboost 1000 in parallel?

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

You never want to wire power supplies in parallel.

It's extremely hard to make two power supplies with exactly the same output voltage, and if they aren't equal the one with higher voltage will push current backwards through the lower one. That's never good. At best, the lower voltage supply will just act like a load and steal efficiency from the higher voltage one. At worst, you'll overheat something to the point where it catches fire.

It's safe to use multiple power supplies as long as there's a significant amount of resistance between them though. If you connect two supplies to opposite ends of a 1m NeoPixel strip, the strip provides enough distributed load to keep the power supplies from damaging each other.

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