Tag Archives: AEM10941

AEM10941 Evaluation Unboxing and Setup

Received the 3AAEM10941CPCX10 evaluation kit for the AEM10941 solar harvesting chip today.

Box the kit came in. Surprised how “plain” the box is. Usually manufactures for evaluation kits have fancy boxes with branding on it so it can be viewed from the engineer’s storage shelf ;) .
Inside. There was some bubble wrap I removed to keep everything from being shaken around.
The super caps that come with the kit. Part numbers: DMT3N4R2U224M3DTA0 and DMF3Z5R5H474M3DTA0.
The demo board and quick start guide.
Two different kinds of solar panels. An Outdoor (smaller size) and Inside (larger size) type of panel.
Part numbers for the solar panels are LL200-2.4-37 for the indoor panel and MPT2.4-21 for the outdoor panel. From the little bit I know about solar panels is that these are probably tuned to the light frequencies of there environment.
The demo board. Quality of assembly isn’t the best. Jumpers are not soldered straight. Biggest one is the STATUS[2] pin on the upper right of the board. Also, the board’s jumpers are not set out of the box for the given example. Annoying to say the least.
First step on firing up the the demo board is to set these CFG pins. Shown is how mine arrived. You need to set the jumpers to CFG[2] = 0, CFG[1] = 1, and CFG[0] = 1.
Next, solder one of the super capacitors to the back side of the board as shown. I used the DMF3Z5R5H474M3DTA0 which is the larger of the two.
Set the BAL jumper to connect BAL to ToCN. BAL is the balance pin of the super capacitor. These super capacitors are actually two cells in series and the balance pin is the connection between the two.
Then attach the solar panel to the SRC terminal. To see if there is voltage output I put a LED across the LVOUT. The LVOUT voltage regulator is set to 1.8V which is below the forward voltage of the LED I chose.

Its possible it won’t light up right away. It takes sometime for the super capacitor to charge up. You can charge up the super capacitor with a power supply set to 3.3V and current limited to around 10-20mA. Make sure to not reverse bias the charging!

Voltage across the super capacitor while charging up off the solar panel!
Categories: Breakout Boards, HW/SW Hacks, PCBA & ENG

AEM10941

The AEM10941 is a solar harvesting IC. It handles a small solar panel and charges either a lithium battery or a super capacitor. I ordered a evaluation board (part number: 3AAEM10941CPCX10) to test it out for the Cat Feeder Unreminder but I went ahead and made a footprint for it in Eagle. The evaluation board comes with a couple solar panels and some super capacitors to mess around with.

Categories: PCBA & ENG