Yesterday’s post brought up some good comments, which I’d like to expand on a bit.

To summarise, this is about how to switch power to an electric circuit using an I/O pin.

Yesterday’s solution worked for me, but would fail if the voltage range is not as nicely predictable, i.e. trying to control say between 2 and 12V with an I/O pin which supplies 1.8 to 3.3V. In this case, the 0.7V diode drop of the base-to-emitter junction of a transistor won’t always be of much help.

Let’s examine some approaches. First, what is perhaps the most obvious way:

With a “normal” (BJT) NPN transistor, you feed it some current by making an I/O pin high, and it’ll conduct. There needs to be a resistor in series, large enough to limit the current, but small enough to drive the transistor into saturation (10 kΩ should work for loads up to say 25 mA, you can reduce it to switch more current).

With an N-MOSFET, you pull the gate up, again by setting an I/O pin high. In this case there should be a resistor to pull the gate down until the I/O pin is set up as an output, to prevent power-up glitches. This resistor can be much larger, 1 MΩ or more. MOSFETs need almost no current (“flow”), they just need voltage (“pressure”) to function.

The benefit of these circuits is that you can easily switch 5V, 12V, or even 24V – with an I/O pin which remains at very low voltage levels (say 1.8 to 3.3V)

In a perfect world, these would both be fine, and be very convenient: “1” is on, “0” is off.

Unfortunately, a transistor is not a perfect switch, so there will be some residual voltage drop over it (0.2..0.4V for the BJT, under 0.1V for the MOSFET). Also, the selected MOSFET has to switch on at low voltages – many types need 4V or more to fully switch on.

One problem with these “low-side” switches (i.e. in the ground wire), is that the circuits will start to float: with a small voltage drop over the transistor, all signal levels to this circuit will be raised slightly, and sometimes unpredictably. So if the circuit has any other connections to the microcontroller (or anything else, for that matter), then these levels will vary somewhat. It’s like shaking hands with someone while standing on a treadmill :)

What’s even worse: when the power is switched off, the circuit ends up being tied to its power supply “+” side, but disconnected from ground – this can cause all sorts of nasty problems with electricty finding its way through other connected pins.

Having said that: if the circuit to be switched has no other outside connections, then either of these setups will work just fine. One example is LEDs and LED strips – which is why the MOSFET Plug uses N-MOSFETs exactly as outlined here. All you need to do is stick with “Common Anode” type RGB LED’s, i.e. tie all the “+” pins (anodes) together to the power supply, and let the MOSFETs do the switching between the “-” pins (cathodes) and GND.

For anything more elaborate, we need “high-side switching” – coming up tomorrow!