Hey guys,
Just got my photon powered by something that’s more user friendly if using more than one 5V peripheral.
UBEC = “Universal Battery Elimination Circuit” , and they are normally used in the RC world to power servos and what not off the main power supply.
It has a chip based Voltage Regulator that is superior to a linear regulator. gives off little to no heat, and noise reduction to supply “Clean” power.
To make it really useful i added a 5mm barrel jack for the input:
Nice for using external wall supplies.
For the output i just put some pins on for easy breadboard use:
Thanks for reading,
Hope this helps someone!
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They do work great and have a huge input voltage range, i did find the output can be a little noisy with the cheaper ones and i would recommend adding a couple of caps to the power rail to help filter out the noise.
Thanks for the advice,
How would you go about doing that?
What value capacitor?
I typically use 1uF ceramic and 100uF electrolytic, trim the legs down and plug them straight into the breadboard power rails. just take note of the polarity of the electrolytic.
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@Thewierd1, great info!
Just to clarify, the UBEC is basically a step-down (buck) mode DC-to-DC converter. There are lots of versions available from a whole bunch of sources. The Photon uses a buck converter to generate its own 3.3v! As @Hootie81 points out, cheap versions of these (any buck or boost converter) tend to be noisy on their output which is not good for the Photon’s own converter. Using good quality units, like those from Pololu, Adafruit or Sparkfun or by adding filter caps as @Hootie81 suggests is really vital to “safe” operation. 
Got it,
Learning more and more everyday here! I’m going to go add those caps now…
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