By just looking at the picture above, we’re pretty sure that most Hackaday readers will have guessed by now that much power can be dissipated by this electric load. For those who don’t know, an electric load (or dummy load) is a device used to simulate a charge on a system for testing purposes. This is quite handy when measuring battery capacities or testing power supplies.
The heart of the device that [Kerry] designed is based on 6 power MOSFETs, a few operational amplifiers and an Arduino compatible ATmega328p microcontroller. Sense resistors are used to measure how much current is passing through the MOSFETs (and therefore the load), the MCP4921 Digital to Analog Converter (DAC) from microchip is used to set the current command, and the load’s voltage is measured by the ATmega ADC. Measuring the latter allows a constant power load mode (as power = current * voltage). In his article, [Kerry] shows that he can simulate a charge of up to 200W.

Filed under: tool hacks