Low heat 3.3V Power Regulator/Supply w/ 12 to 15V source

Components & Accessories
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I’m building a Bluetooth adapter. It’ll be powered off an automotive alternator and or battery so 12 to 15V max. I’ve got most everything prototyped but now need a power supply that’ll convert the as much as 15V down to 3.3V for the board. I need to figure out what will work best for a power supply. Thought I’d just snag one of these and try it:

One thing is FOR CERTAIN, it has to run COOOOOOL. The load isn’t too much (I need to measure it yet). It will be powering some IS2 chips, SD card and ESP32.

I think that chipset on breakout board will work but I’m not a Electrical Engineer so unsure what else might be worth considering. Looking at ESP32 Thing Plus Schematic there’s some pretty snazzy battery charging circuitry but I don’t think I’ll need that for my project nor would it drive my circuitry? FYI ~ This forum has been awesome. Thanks for your help.

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That is our best option for that input range & output, good work :smiley:

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Thanks @TS-Russell

12 years ago I helped design a battery controller. I was in charge of firmware. It was an aircraft battery. We implemented a Buck Boost regulator but my EE counterpart next to me designed that part of the system. I’m not even sure of what types of power supplies are out there otherwise (aside from voltage regulators like the 7805). I’m basically cutting my chops again catching up with a somewhat simple design. Will serve as a inline BT & SD MP3 adapter for an automobile but have other designs in mind which will need more complex and cleaner power supply. Eventually I’ll need a highly accurate voltage reference as I want to build a instrument to measure various signals on automobile.

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Sounds neat - feel free to share progress!
You can always take a look at OpAmps for the later implementation/cleaner power supply needs

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Cool… I had wondered if OpAmps get used in power supplies. I suppose they work well when Voltage needs increased / boosted?

I’ve got a few more parts of the circuit design need figured out… I’ll make separate posts but think I can get most of it figured out either way. I’ll eventually have a board with I2S chips, SD card slot, buck regulator (this post). It won’t have a serial chip on it for programming. I want to have that on a separate board and leave just a small header on it. My thoughts are to use the FTDI chip that Espressif uses for JTAG debugging / Programming. Then in future designs I can do JTAG debugging as well as program the microcontroller.

Anyways, most of the software is working… I need to catch up on C++ though, a lot seems to have changed / evolved since I quit around 2012. Lots of new programming techniques centered around classes. Need to find a good YouTube course to catch up there.

Thanks for the help!