DROK DC 12V to 5V Buck Converter, 10pcs Mini Voltage Regulator Board DC 4.5-20V 12V 9V Step Down to 1-16V 5V Reducer 3A Fixed Adjustable Volt Output Transformer Power Supply Stabilizer Module

I bought these to power an ESP32 devkit boards. They are a little bit weird if you haven't used this type of board before since you have to modify several solder pads to get the output that you want. In my case I wanted a 3.3V output so I solder bridged the 3.3V output pads and desoldered/split the adjustable voltage enable pads and viola! Perfect 3.33V output. Voltage is stable under load and the ESP32 seems quite happy with the power it is getting. It functions perfectly as advertised and I am happy with it so far. These boards seem very well made with clean, well manufactured PCB's, clean parts installation, clear markings and good soldering throughout. They are small enough to fit easily into tight project spaces and the choice of multiple fixed voltages as well as the option for a variable user set voltage makes these boards very versatile. If you are looking for a small, clean, reliable power source for low power applications I would definitely recommend these boards.

This is a great little switcher, and this is coming from a EE with 40+ years of product development experience, including switching PS design for Burr-Brown (now TI), so I do know something about this‼! Granted, the load regulation is not “awesome”, but is still decent for 95% of applications. No load 5V output is 4.99V, and at 1A it is 4.80V. In case you are worrying about dipping below 4.75V (TTL/USB…), use adjustable mode, and set the output to 5.20V, and you’ll be fine. If you want perfect, go and spend $30-$100 apiece for an industrial switcher… which will be much larger in size. This one is <$2 per board, so, let’s all be sensible when passing judgment. I do like the decent efficiency, important if running on batteries. Running 12V input, and 5V output, it barely gets warm at 1A (chip at ~40C with spot IR). I am running a Raspberry Pi on it, with a RAK Gateway, along with an external Cellular Hotspot. No issues what so ever. Some of the equipment presents 1.5A-2A fast peak loads, and this switcher handles it just fine. Dropout voltage is about 0.8V, meaning you need minimum of 5.8V on the input to get 5V on the output. Below this the supply tracks the input, modulated by the load line imperfection. I temperature tested it in the oven, at 60C ambient to simulate the inside of the outdoor case in the summer Sun, and it was OK, but you may want to mount it on a metal slab with conductive adhesive tape to be safe, as the junction approaches 125C. Interestingly, the output voltage di d not move more than few mV at 60C. It is interesting to note that this switcher has no issues feeding another chained switcher: I also needed 3.8V, but my system could not run this switcher of the 12V, for system reasons that are beyond the scope here. I found that chaining them works fine, with no need for additional caps in between. This was a surprise to me. I tried to chain 4 of them, just for fun, and it worked OK too. I read some of the comments: If you can’t cut a trace to disable the default mode, you should not be playing with this. This is clearly spelled out in the Amazon listing. To me, it took an Exacto-knife, and 10 seconds. Granted, the module size is tiny (which is the whole idea), so you may need some magnification, depending on your age. I used a bino-microscope, but could have done without if I had to. Remember – this is a <$2 module. As a value it is absolutely awesome. The design is average in my estimation, but consistent with low price, and will work for you. As my vote, I purchased another 10 for my lab. That should tell you what you need to know.

Great little buck converters. They worked fine. I got these because of the size, ajustibility, and the number in the package. I bought some male header pins separately to solder on. They work great with the pins!

I've purchased about 20 of these now. They are realtly nice for controlling voltages higher than the microcontroller can tolerate. I use these to build small solar power displays with lights, fans, servos and motors. Using their enable pin, these buck converters allow a 3.3 micro to control and downregulate 12-14 volts of power to individual devices without having to separately add a switch, mosfet, or relay. The description of the device however suggests this is done through a pullup resistor. When I read this I thought I could simply overcome a (10k?) pullup resistor with the GPIO output from a micro sourced to ground and the device would shut off. This is not how they work. After a bit of playing, it's evident that there is a solder bridge near the enable pin that needs to be removed (cut or wicked away) before the enable pin can be used. If you simply apply ground to the enable pin it's a dead short and will quickly destroy the device and release the magic blue smoke. Once the solder bridge is cut, there is no pullup or pulldown resistor on the circuit. The voltage will float and act erratically. Once connected to the microcontroller it works perfectly though. This is a really nice feature at this price point and has saved me quite a bit of time wiring switches through other mechanisms. Removing the other solder bridge disconnects the potentiometer that adjusts the voltage just like the description says. The device will then require a new solder bridge on the back side to set the voltage. These pads are quite small and somewhat difficult to manage but it can be done. The potentiometers are a bit wonky and setting a perfect output voltage is a little tricky. From a power-saving standpoint, the device consumes virtually nothing when the enable pin is held low. My DMM reads 1.8 microamps--this is a huge plus over some other systems I have used. Running just an LED for testing purposes (4 mA), the device is 87% efficient. Using a 10 ohm resistor at 5.08v (500 mA) the voltage sags to 5.04 and the efficiency is 76%. Both of these were performed using an input voltage of 7v, efficiency is likely worse at higher voltages. Overall these work well for my purposes. The product description could have been clearer and had more of the details I included in this review.

This aux board is an ideal replacement for a linear regulator in certain battery applications. It is not particularly accurate but works well enough if used right. Inexperienced hobbyists probably should use something else. Some of the reviews here are cringe-worthy. I am using it to drop from 13+ volts from a 2W solar panel, to a little over 7 V to keep a lead-acid battery charged. The switcher efficiency means that a 12V panel puts more energy in the battery. Lead acid is much safer and better at lower temps for our outside, year-round industrial application. Just adjust the max voltage output for the right trickle charge voltage for the battery. Be sure to put a Schottky on the output to keep the panel from draining the battery at night (the little regulator will pull power in reverse). The output has transients, as all switchers do, but that doesn't bother the battery, which acts like a huge cap. With the 7 volts, I also energize latching solenoid coils, which pull about 700 mA for 30 msec. The little switcher handles this fine. Next, I use an LDO regulator, with the recommended caps and protection diodes, to regulate to 5 VDC for running the microcomputer and various auxiliary chips like RTC, EEPROM, etc. The LDO keeps the switcher transients off the chips and has better regulation. So far, the little boards have been reliable, and we are now using them as standard to replace linear regs. We test each board for about 24 hours, but have only found 1 that was a little wonky.

You inept reviewers need to stop handing 5-star reviews to clearly flawed products or manufacturers will NEVER FIX ANYTHING. It's hard to imagine screwing up such a simple device, but whoever designed this thing is apparently a regular offender. I believe it's based off an MP2315 regulator which is actually a pretty efficient synchronous design, albeit somewhat noisy. As with most regulators, there is some dropoff under load so most of this is pretty standard. The pin ordering matches another series of fairly well known regulators, so no foul there. PCB size is about 20mm x 10.7mm. Congrats for not specifying the size of the PCB in the product description. That immediately drops a star. The thing has no mounting holes or features whatsoever. There goes another star. As many have indicated, cutting the trace to use the presets is a stupid idea. It would have been far better to just omit the trace and use the solder jumper, which is actually already there instead of committing your mistake to a trace. Compounding the problem is the fact that the trace you're supposed to cut is right next to the via that sources ALL THE OTHER JUMPERS. If you screw up while cutting that trace, you might wind up cutting the source for all the other jumpers. This is the PCB layout equivalent of urinating upstream of where you get your drinking water. And that right there drops all the rest of the stars. Let's be real: most people are probably going to use this as a USB power source. The 5v preset resistor, which is a 0603 package about 39k ohms, produces 5v under no load. However, as soon as you load it down, the output will dip. Some devices might not like this. The USB specification actually allows voltage to go up to 5.25v to account for stuff like this and cable losses. So what you really want is a preset resistor around 40-41k ohms. Fortunately, the adjustable resistor is actually surprisingly easy to remove from the PCB. Just alternate heating the terminals a bit and you can push it off. You don't have to try to cut the trace if you do this. Unfortunately, the 5v preset resistor is kind of blocked off by the inductor so it's not easy to modify. Even more unfortunately, I don't even have a 41k ohm resistor. I do have 82k ohm resistors though. So instead, I knocked off the resistors for the 12v and the 9v presets, put 82k resistors in their place, and bridged both their solder jumpers. Since that puts them both in parallel, that effectively gave me 41k ohms. I've attached the pic of the topside of my mod. With that, my no-load voltage is sitting right at about 5.24v, and with a 0.8A load it dropped to about 5.2v. I'm actually powering two Raspberry Pi's right now; neither has given an undervoltage warning. In short: do not buy. Manufacturer: fix your product.

I've read mixed reviews of this product so I ran some tests after purchasing five. First of all I think cutting and soldering the voltage selection bridges requires a digital magnifier. Mine turns the adj PCB trace from almost invisible to a half inch on a nice large LCD. I found it easy to cut the adj trace using a fresh new single edge razor blade and holding the PCB upside down and cutting along the solder bridge gap holding the razor at a slight edge. Bridging the gap for 9 volts (my application will work fine with anything from 6.5 V up to 11.5 V) was slightly tricky, one of five accidentally bridged between 12V and the 9V pad, but easy to see in the scope and easy to fix. I would say it took about five minutes total to set up all five supplies to output fixed nine volts. I used a recently calibrated Rigol DP832 to provide 13.800 V input and monitor current draw / watts. I used a DM3068 to measure output voltage. I used an MSO2102A in AC coupled mode to monitor ripple. Ripple was constant around 25 mV at all times and all loads on all devices. I used a randomly selected 100 ohm 1 watt resistor as a load to simulate my app load which is near a watt which actually drew about 850 mW input according to my supply. #1 unloaded 8.797 V loaded 8.779 V #2 unloaded 8.831 V loaded 8.814 V #3 unloaded 8.822 V loaded 8.802 V #4 unloaded 8.789 V loaded 8.762 V #5 unloaded 8.750 V loaded 8.731 V No obvious temp increase. Apparently drawing about one watt with an output of nine volts will drop the actual output voltage by around 20 mV, which is unnoticeable small, although measurable. Another observation: the voltage drop under load is far smaller than the variation between devices. Would not suggest using this as a calibration voltage source. Overall, I'm very pleased. Small, light, cheap, good enough. Not perfect, but good enough.

Update: 2nd pic it the updated version on this project but I still plan on using the 1mm "enable" holes for mounting. Ill b using 1mm x 5mm bolts that I found on amazon. Ill tell ya aside from slapping glue on it or hotmelt on this to hold it in place (which seems to be how they want u to mount this) I'm trying to hard mount this . its ridiculous. 2nd are the pcbs in action (top center of pic) ond feds the PWM for LED dimming and the other is for the rest of the peripheral stuff. These Mini power supplies are being fed by 6 21700 lithium batterypack with a 14.4 @40kAh output. I like the product but it's almost impossible to actually use it. GOOD LUCK Ill tell ya, the lack of mounting holes. I mean put acouple of more mm on this board so we can mount it. As u can c im using the "enable" pad as a mounting surface. I drilled a 2 mm hole and mounted 2x 2mm machine screws. I used 2 circuit boards so I could have 2 mounting holes to secure this micro pcb. I mean its really cool that its so small but without mounting holes is pretty much useless. Im sorry I dont leave pcb blowing in the wind. I want them secured. This is a major defect. Im waiting for the mounting screws to touch and short these things our. It wont take much. PLEASE ADD 2 MOUNTING HOLES TO THIS. I mean whats the big problem? Oo gee! Ur pcb is 4mm longer. lol 😆 I mean guys come on, just do it.