Electrical – Multiple buck converters from same source

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I'm trying to build a 18 servomotor hexapod robot (6 legs), running from a 11.1 V Li-Po battery supply. I needed to step down the voltage to 5 V for the servos to operate, but the current requirements are very high (approx 10-14 A). I can't build my own high current buck converter right now because the TI chip I was considering for my use is surface mount.

The only buck converter I can get from my area are cheap 5A ones. Can I wire three separate 5A buck converters for a pair of legs each, and connect them to the same battery? If not, is there any other possible solution (different battery source, etc) I could use to power up the servos?

Best Answer

You can certainly feed multiple buck converters from a common power source. The problem arises when you want to connect outputs together - one converter will tend to try and supply the full load so, to be safe, use several buck converters and spread the servo motor loads equally on each.

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