tl;dr
Ive been looking for the perfect lipo charge/boost board to work with my Arduino projects but I’ve never been satisfied with whats on the market. Since I made the custom TP4056 board it got me thinking about how I can utilize that going forward. Then I found the 10A45 tiny boost board and I knew what I needed to do. Join me below to see what I cooked up.
Hardware
My reason for making this mash up board was I couldn’t find a good lipo charge and boost that would power my Arduino projects that didn’t draw very much power. The thing is that most power bank boards if they don’t detect that 50mah is being drawn then they shut off. This is how I came up with the idea about mashing the TP4056 and the 10A45 and putting them on the same board, I could also add in a switch to turn it on and off too. I had already been messing around with the TP4056 and designing my own boards so I had a good starting point.
I have used the tiny 10A45 boost in the past but not really gave it much thought. I did go digging to see if I could find any info on this tiny little wonder, I found this schematic which is how I learnt that there is an enable pin on this chip so It can be toggled on and off. I double checked it against the PCB I had and it all matched up. I set about deleting the protection part off my TP4056 board and adding in the 10A45 and switch in its place. I got the boards back and all was well….not quite.
Safely first
I’ve been using lipo battery’s out of “disposable” e-cigs, The only trouble with this is that they don’t have any built in protection and you may have noticed that I removed that from the TP4056 board to make room for the 10A45 chip. I used the TP4056+10A45 board in a few projects and noticed that they had drained below a safe recharging level so I knew I had to design a small PCB with the safety chips on. I made them really small and thin so they should be strapped to the side of the e-cig battery’s. Lucky most Lipo battery will come with built in safety and if not you can just add this tiny board.
Assembly
If you order the PCB’s and the 2 board listed above you can just transfer the parts from one to another, All the parts labeled are the same on the donor boards and PCB, I use a hot plate but you can use hot air but just watch the tiny 0402 resistors on the TP4056 boards. The only parts you will need other then the donor boards are the 5.1k resistors for the USB C charging. Also If you want to change the charging current of the board you can look up the chart here and swap out the R3 resistor.
Files
Kicad 7 board files – https://github.com/facelesstech/tp4056-10A45
Facelesstech 
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