Internet has changed everything in last decade.
Most of the things we do are very much dependent on the internet and if internet is somehow not available, our life stops.
In the last couple of years several products came into the market which help people have uninterrupted access to the internet.
One of such product is Mini UPS for Wi-Fi routers. If main Power goes Wi-Fi/Internet still keep working 🙂
Even if you don’t have a inverter or UPS at home but you can still can power your Wi-Fi router using mini UPS.
This powers your Wi-Fi/internet router for couple of hours (3-4 hours) in case of main power failure.
Recently. I purchased Oakter Mini UPS for my home use. As soon as I got it, I was curious to know how it works and how it was designed. So, I did a teardown and here are the details. Hope you will enjoy it.
Packaging
For a consumer electronics product, packaging is very important. You can see how the product packaged.
Honestly, I was a bit disappointed by the way product was packaged.
Carton box is good, user manual is fine but I would not use a thermocol for packaging a good product like this and the way polythene warped 🙁
This impacts the first impression.
I would have used a shrinkable plastic cover so as to pack nicely and protect the device from any scratches and still maintain the aesthetics.
In India, I have seen most companies don’t pay attention to aesthetics but it is very important in brand building, especially in consumer electronics domain.
I would assume and hope they will fix this soon.
Enclosure
Construction
It wasn’t easy to open the enclosure. Aluminum extrusion is used along with both side acrylic (I guess) based cover which is glued with the aluminum enclosure.
DC Socket is there to connect the power supply input. Heat shrink tube is missing which will help to isolate it front touching any metal part.
ON/OFF rocker switch is provided and one LED is there to give indication of battery status.
In order to avoid so much of wiring and multiple PCBs, they could have designed differently using a single PCB concept with a different type of DC socket & ON/OFF switch.
Electronics
This variant of Mini UPS is of 12V and Dual 3.7V Cell is used as battery. It was glued inside and I wasn’t able to take it out.
So, the 12V DC Input charges the battery using battery charger IC TP5100, it is a dc dc based battery charger so it is quite efficient compared to Linear battery charger IC.
In the back up mode, the battery voltage is converted back to 12V using boost converter circuit which is using XLSemi XL6019 DC DC Converter IC.
I hope you found this teardown useful and learned something new today!
If you have any questions please ask in the comments section below, I will try to respond as soon as possible.
You can read other teardown blogs and watch teardown videos.
I am currently working as an embedded systems design consultant and helping companies build custom embedded products, develop test automation solution for their PCB or complete product.
If you have any feedback about the blog, you can share in the comments below or you can also contact me directly.
Read more interesting articles on Embedded Systems Design.
Very poor product quality
Kindly update the article with more pictures of batteries and other components. DIY becomes easy for those who want to change input output voltage.