Power Supplies for ESP32 Arduino Based Projects

You’ll be surprised to learn that not all power supplies are created equal ;) Or if you’ve bought more than 1 or 2 online you’ll not be surprised by that at all. There are some that are so wonderfully cheap and seductive that you purchase them only to have them fail on day 3 or do something even worse. I have fallen prey to that in the past, but not anymore. This post is nothing about any of that, but just the well documented differences between name brand (not rip off!) imported power supplies. There are still issues you need to be aware of when selecting a power supply for your Arduino or IOT based project and evidently, specifically for your ESP32 based projects. 

Here you’ll see 2 name brand, Mean Well Din rail mounted power supplies of similar ratings.

The one on the left is a MeanWell model: HDR-15-12 with a slightly blurry sticker on the top which I apologize for. It accepts line voltage input and outputs 12v at 1.25 amps. It is also very nicely tiny and uses only a very small amount of your din rail space. It’s also cheaper than any other Mean Well supply I’ve seen of similar output. It also did not work reliably with an ESP32 based IOT device. The one on the right is also a Mean Well supply model DR-15-12. It also outputs 12v at 1.25 amps but it has the “DC OK” indicator on it.

The cheaper one on the left caused my ESP32 based device to reliably startup in firmware upload mode if you waited long enough between re-powering for the internal capacitors to be discharged. If the power was disconnected for more than a minute or so the device would not properly restart when power was applied again! This is obviously not acceptable as you need to be able to plug in a device and have it actually start up. The DR-15 model on the right starts up the device every single time without any care for how long it’s been disconnected and is only slightly more expensive and only slightly wider than the cheaper one.

So whats the difference? The only thing I can find is that the “Rise Time” on the spec sheet for the 2 is significantly different. It is listed in the “output” section of the sheet and along with the “setup” time. The setup time is the amount of time between when power is applied before the output actually turns on. If you’ve used many switching power supplies you’ll have noticed that there is a delay between applying power and any voltage coming out of them. This is not generally an issue, just the housekeeping and charging up of everything that the power supply must do before it is ready to supply regulated output. It’s the “Rise Time” that seems to be important. 

In the case of the cheaper HDR-15 model the rise time is 80ms. Which doesn’t sound like a lot. The slightly more expensive one is only 30ms. I have measured these on the scope and it does indeed seem like they are the problem. In my case they are running a secondary 3.3v switching supply on the board, so your exact requirements and the point at which is causes you trouble will be different based on that.  

It does seem that a longer Rise Time can cause the ESP32 (and possibly ESP8266) based designs to startup in firmware upload mode, as if you were holding gpio0 to ground even when you are most definitely not, rather than starting up normally.  There is some allusion to this in the ESP32 documentation about making sure that if you’re running from batteries that you have a power controller that will not apply power to the ESP32 until it is above a certain level. Or as I’ve learned if it is going to within 30 or 40ms but not as long as 80ms. Keep in mind while testing that if I unplugged and replugged the supply within say 10 or 20 seconds it would come up fine. It was only with power outages that lasted long enough for it to discharge all it’s internal caps that it would fail.

While the exact timing that causes your design problems will be different based on the 3.3v regulator design if you have this specific issue then I would first recommend testing with a power supply with a faster rise time. In my case the chip just did nothing when powering up. Re-applying the programming cable revealed the “waiting for download” message from the ESP32 making it clear that it thought I was grounding the gpio0 pin even though I wasn’t. With a faster rise time it starts up reliably every single time.