Back-up Battery for Arduino

Building a back-up battery for your Arduino just takes a little bit of soldering! Take a look at the following circuit.

This is how the circuit works: Parallel circuits always have equal voltages (Kirchoff's Voltage Law); but when you have two parallel voltages, you can't push a high voltage down so you must push the low voltage up! Our battery wouldn't appreciate that very much though, so we've adding some diodes in series of each voltage source. This means that the voltage supplied to the Arduino will be the maximum of the two voltage sources.

If you have a 9V wall wart which tends to supply roughly 9.2V and a 9V battery which tends to supply 9V or less, then only the wall wart will be drawn on (well mostly at least...)

What we're going to do is solder two barrel jacks into your protoboard. It will have the normal power supply and the back-up battery plugged into it, and will plug into the Arduino itself. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to build a back-up battery for your Arduino.

Bill of Materials

Two barrel jacks (2.1mm) 9V battery holder Two diodes DC cable (male)

Step-By-Step

Make sure you know what's going on with the barrel jacks. The top pin is Vcc (positive) and the bottom pin is GND (negative). Plug the circuit into your breadboard (you can ignore the part with the resistors) Make sure you have both barrel jacks and the DC cable referring to the same ground.Test it out: if you switch the battery on and off is voltage constant? if you unplug the wall wart, does the voltage drop to the battery's voltage? Solder it into your protoboard.