How to Battery Power an Arduino!

this is a microcontroller known as an Arduino this is the next size up but it's also an Arduino and this is another type of microcontroller called an ESP 32 it doesn't really matter which one you pick they all share these common properties of being able to be loaded with code and then used to read signals from inputs and control outputs and they are super fun and have nearly infinite possibilities but they become a lot more powerful when you learn how to power them off of batteries so that you don't constantly need them plugged into a computer or a wall outlet so in today's video I'm going to show you how to power your Arduino or other microcontroller project off of batteries essentially every type of microcontroller follows the convention of having two pins to provide it DC voltage for power these pins are typically labeled V in and ground if you're buying a type of microcontroller that doesn't have the pin out labeled on the controller which is pretty unusual just check the manufacturing specs to figure out which pins these are because they should still be included even if they're not labeled e in means provide positive DC voltage in here and ground is obviously ground or negative or Zer volts DC in today's video to demonstrate the basic functionality I'm going to stand up a really minimal Arduino project which just takes an input signal from a capacitive touch sensor acting as basically a button and then it'll turn on and off an LED light when uh the button is pressed so it's basically the simplest code we could possibly have because today's video is is not about the code it's about how we power these with batteries so I'll show you a few different options for powering with batteries but what you should know is that microcontrollers can be slightly different but generally they'll have a range of DC voltages that they can be provided uh and you generally want to check the manufacturer's website for what that range is for your board but for the examples in today's video I'll be using an Arduino Nano and the listed voltage is 5 to 18 volts but online forums were like actually these things will turn on as low as volts you just might not be able to provide the correct output voltage to certain outputs so we're going to show several examples in this video so follow along and let's dive into the first actual example so as I said I'm going to start with a pretty minimal example for mine and I'm just going to use two standard ablea batteries now these can provide 1.5 volts DC each so when you wire two batteries in series you get a total of 3vs DC now I'll link all of these little holster uh Hardware pieces that I'm going to be using in today video I'll link them all below so if you're looking for something simil similar and very cheap and easy to use um I'll leave the descriptions below but this is just a uh casing for two ablea batteries for hobbyists for purposes exactly like this it's super easy to just pop in your two ablea batteries and it gives you these two wire leads coming off of it one with the positive and one with the negative that we're going to use to see if we can power this board with just 3 volts okay so I have my Arduino here in a breadboard so that I can can take that v in and ground pins and uh just jumper them over to these power rails that you see on the side of the breadboard you could absolutely directly solder these leads into your board if you're trying to make like a permanent setup but anyways let's plug in the leads from our battery compartment into the power rails for this little Arduino project and what you can see immediately which is really cool the little red LED on the Arduino starts turning on uh it turns on red to let you know that it is in fact powered up and you are able to now use the code so even though 3 volts is below the minimum listed uh viable voltage from Arduino it does appear that the code is running and if we tap the button you can see the light turning on and turning off what maybe you can tell through the YouTube video but maybe you can't is that the light is pretty dim and actually if you were to power this through a computer um you'd actually find that the light was quite a bit brighter so this should give you a bit of a heads up that 3 volts does get the code running on the Arduino but two DC batteries is not necessarily the optimal way to battery power a microcontroller project brings us to the next example which is uh frankly what I would recommend for powering your projects with an Arduino and that's the 9vt DC battery the main reason I recommend that one is uh with it being 9 volts you're able to easily provide up to 5 volts and longer amp hours to anything that you're trying to power with your Arduino um and it's squarely in the middle of the arduino's listed recommended ranges and the little uh carriers just like we saw for the DC batteries are also not expensive and what I do like about a lot of the 9volt ones that I've seen is they come with an onoff switch so you can control the power feed to your Arduino project using the battery compartment you don't have to lift them out all the time which is actually super nice because if you're battery powering an Arduino uh and you don't want it running all the time the only way to kill power uh using something like this would be to actually remove the leads which is sort of tedious or pop the batteries out which is also sort of annoying so 9volt DC using a battery carrier that has onof and let's plug this into the breadboard and you're going to see uh kind of similar to what we did with the three actually exactly what we did with the two ablea batteries but see if you can notice the difference in the brightness of the LED using the 9volt battery okay so powering it up uh same code AS on it same inputs and outputs Landing the wires in exactly the same spots and now you can see like quite a brighter LED light at this point so no functional difference between the 3vt and the 9volt battery in terms of the code that's running on the Arduino but its ability to properly power outputs is clearly affected and there's one final example I want to talk to you about today which is using these like rechargeable hobby batteries uh which are this one is like nickel metal hydride um but these the powering is very similar but the application is slightly different and these are better for things with like Motors and servos so I want to show you that as well and just before we jump into that I want to say a quick thank you to the sponsor of today's video PCB way PCB way has everything makers and hobbyists need to take their hobby designs and turn them into highquality production level Parts while they specialize in printed circuit boards and printed circuit board assembly they also have everything you need to turn highquality 3D printed parts and metal CNC prototypes around in no time at all like let's say you have a uh fantasy football league that punishes the lowest score every week and you got tasked with it and you want to make something cool battery powered using an Arduino that people are going to wear around to let everyone know they suck at fancy football well PCB way has everything you need to design an electronic board that embeds neopixel LEDs in it has an Arduino driving it for code and input leads for a 9volt DC battery every time I've worked with PCB way the service has been extremely high quality pricing is super reasonable and the turnaround time is great so be sure to check them out and thank you to PC way for sponsoring today's video now let's take a quick look at the Arduino when we plug in this 9.6v nickel metal hydride battery so 9.6 volts obviously functionally not very different from the 9V uh DC battery that we looked at in the last example the light is still quite bright the Arduino is still capable of powering on and powering off all of the same things but the biggest difference here is the total reusability of it these batteries typically have quite a few more amp hours than your standard offthe shelf 9volt battery and because they typically come with just a wall plug uh Outlet you could have several of these if you had like an RC car or an RC plane you could have a lot of these plugged in um and you could have more of them charged and ready so that if you uh were running low on battery you could just swap out the batteries where with the 9volt battery a lot of these aren't reusable and if you're doing a lot of Arduino projects that are battery powered you could be burning through non-reusable batteries a lot all right so super useful concept today but not particularly difficult if you do have any questions be sure to let me know about in the comments below please consider leaving a like on the video and subscribing to the channel That helps me out a ton again all of the hardware that I used and showed in this video will be linked below as well as a link to our sponsor PCB way so check all of those out thank you so much to my patreon supporters and thank you to everyone for supporting lamaster Tech we hit 16,000 subscribers on the channel this week which is just outstanding and so exciting let me know in the comments below what you'd like to see more of on the channel and as always good luck with your code thanks for watching and see you next time thanks bye