General purpose step up

Step-Up Converter: 5 V USB-C to 12 V (especially for PC fans)

Was warm. Did not find a good source for an affordable, compact, not-made-of-counterfeit-components step-up converter. Designed something that JLC would manufacture for me.

Pretty (?) pictures

Note this was an exercise in rapid design, more than beauty.

Schematic

3D Render

License

CERN-OHL-S v2 for the schematic, layout and TLV symbol.

The footprint and symbol for the USB connector have been sourced from JLC/LCSC's EasyEDA library, https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C2988369.html , and converted to KiCAD automatically. License there is

All elements of the Services, including without limitation the general design and the Content, are protected by trade dress, copyright, moral rights, trademark, and other laws relating to intellectual property rights. The Services may only be used for the intended purpose for which such Web Site and Services are being made available.

and I think "purpose of being made available" here is use for designing electronics with LCSC parts / for JLCPCB production.

Not being super happy about that, I'm not including them as redistributable in the sources here, but here's how you can get them.

1. install uv; we'll use it to run the JLC2KiCadLib tool without permanent installation.
2. use uvx to run the tool:

   cd parts
   uvx JLC2KiCadLib C2988369

Building

Everything aside from the USB-C connector should be pretty feasible to solder by hand with a fine-ish tip, if you did any SMD work before.

Getting it built

Used the fabrication plugin, installed directly from KiCAD's plugin manager. UI isn't great, the results just work, so that's an endorsement of sorts.

Because I'd have to have ordered the parts in small quantities myself, I however fell back to letting JLCPCB assemble the board, minus screw and pin header connectors; thus, a few, non-basic parts, for which you pay extra tooling fees per BOM line, exist:

• the diode,
• the inductor,
• The potentiometer,
• the USB connector,
• R8, and of course,
• the central RTLV61048.

These are the main assembly cost drivers, and if you can solder them yourself, you'll save a bit. However, at quantity of five, the per-board cost including shipping and parts was below 10€, and thus, the extra shipping costs needed to get these components elsewhere would have more than eaten JLC's extended part costs. (And in fact, getting these boards manufactured thus proved cheaper than soldering any of these myself, since I would also have paid more for each part.)

The things I did hand-solder were the screw connectors (which I don't need on most of the individual boards) and the fan connector – had 2-pin JST-compatible 2.54mm headers lying around (and the fan only needs supply voltage and ground).