What do you grab when a project needs a battery, a brain, and a way to switch power to three other boards at the same time?
M5Stack's answer is the PowerHub, a new dev kit built around an ESP32 that handles the one job most boards ignore: managing power. Instead of hot-gluing a loose LiPo into an enclosure, you drop in an NP-F550 2000mAh pack, the same removable battery Sony ships on many of its cameras, and let the board distribute it. It also accepts standard DC input plus PWR485 and PWR CAN, so it drops into a bus of other M5Stack gear without extra adapters.
What is actually doing the work?
Under the ESP32 sits an STM32 coprocessor that runs the power side so your main firmware stays free for the project logic. Several INA226 ICs read the current and voltage rails over I2C, giving you real per-channel numbers instead of a guess, while the STM32 does the switching. In practice that means you can log how many milliamps each device pulls, cut power to a misbehaving sensor, and toggle a rail from code. Buttons, LEDs, and Grove-style expansion ports round it out, so even if you never touch the power features you still get a capable battery-powered ESP32 board. Multiple output terminals let you fan the same source out to a motor driver, a sensor cluster, and a display without splicing wires or stacking barrel-jack splitters.
The enclosure earns a mention. It has screw holes, holes sized for LEGO studs, and a built-in magnet to slap it onto any ferrous surface. For a classroom robot or a thesis rig that gets torn down and rebuilt every week, that mounting flexibility saves real bench time.
Worth trying?
If you have ever chased a brown-out because three modules fought over one messy power rail, the PowerHub is worth a look. A capstone team could use the INA226 readings to profile exactly where the battery budget goes, then trim the hungriest module. It sells for $36.90 on its own, or $42.90 bundled with the NP-F550 battery. Start by wiring one hungry module through a single channel, watch its milliamp draw in the serial monitor, then add the rest once the numbers make sense. Read the full write-up on Hackster before you plan your wiring.
Originally published on blog.circuit.rocks.
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