First look at the Atorch DL24MP Electronic DC Load
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004644040863.html
https://www.vishay.com/docs/91217/irfp264.pdf
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004644040863.html
https://www.vishay.com/docs/91217/irfp264.pdf
Hello, this is a DC electronic load. It's the A Torch Dl24m and I think the M I Hope the M Uh stands for modular because this is indeed modular. This is the main unit here in the middle and then you can add these additional fan modules which increase the power capability when it's doing its electronic load duties. So Center module is 150 watts, 25 amps, add another module, you get another 150 watts, but you only get an additional 5 amps.
So two modules is 30 amps, 300 watts, three modules which is what I went for I Bought these two additional modules. Uh, it's 450 Watts 35 amps Now that 35 amps has to go through this connector. It also goes through this diode because there's a sort of anti-reverse polarity protection diode there and you can imagine 35 amps going through that. It's going to get quite hot.
It's got this little heatsink and when these fans come on, it is kind of fan cool, but it's kind of secondary. It's not independently cooled. Okay, let's take a quick look at the underneath and you can see there the mosfets. There are four per board, so there are 12 here in total and they are Irfp 264s.
Now on the top of the board, you've also got these resistors. They are R25s, so they're a quarter of an OHM Uh, six. Watts Now I Don't think they're there specifically to burn off heat. they're obviously part of the circuit.
Um, of these mosfets. Let's have a look at the date sheet for these mosfets because they're quite interesting. So here it is Irfp264 and you can see it's a high voltage mosfet um 250 volts, but it has quite a high on Resistance here 75 milliohms. And of course, in this application you want a high on Resistance because you want to burn off energy as heat.
This has to be independently powered through this. DC Barrel Jack So I'm using a a 12 volt USB type-c to power Um trigger unit and then a USB type-c power bank and it uses very little current so that power bank is not going to drain out in any, uh, short order. Now, the little screen unit you can probably see is not terribly bright and it's on this sort of uh cable which plugs in at the front here. So I've tucked it underneath.
um, and it's There are no real mounting things on it other than these thin strips of sticky. So I've just stuck it on here with, um, some blue tack because that seems a sensible place to put it. But let's have a little closer look at that display. So here it is.
I've dropped the blinds to make it look a little brighter. Um, you've got voltage, current, power, effective resistance, total energy, and total milliamp hours here. Also, you've got various modes. This is in constant resistance mode, so it will impose a five or it will make itself appear to be a 5 ohm resistance and dissipate whatever energy a 5 ohm resistance would dissipate.
So let's go through the various modes. so press and hold M and then it flashes the mode and then you can go up or down. So that's constant power. but you get very little time so I'll have to whip through them really quickly. Constant power. That's battery resistance test Power supply test Cable test Constant current and constant voltage and constant voltage. I'm having a lot of trouble with. Let me just check if there are any more modes.
no back to constant resistance. You can also limit the time that this thing is on for if that's useful to you. And you can also set a cutoff voltage so that if you're testing batteries, you can say stop the process or stop pulling power or current. Um, when the voltage gets down to whatever voltage you set there and there are various temperature sensors, there's in temperature I'm not quite sure what that is actually.
there's board temperature and that's the one that goes up when this thing starts burning energy and you can set a point where it will trigger the fans. I've set it to 40 degrees. We'll watch the fans come on in a moment. There's also external temperature down here because there is a supplied external temperature sensor.
Um, Accessories that come with this are this little adapter board which has the various USBS type, C, Micro B, Mini B and also a DC Barrel Jack If you want to test power supplies, there's a little um American to Euro adapter thing screws which are the screws that you have to put through the holes in the Pcbs to bolt the modules together. You get lots of those and you get two 10 amp leads with these Forks which fit into this front terminal block and you get the external temperature sensor so I can get that one out. Just go back to the screen a moment. Um in the off mode if you press and hold the on off button which is the one at the bottom, there you go into the background settings.
Um, this is M moves you through the fields and plus or minus changes the data in those fields. So one of the first things I did I set the standby brightness to maximum brightness. Um so that when it dims after 99 seconds, it doesn't actually dim because dim is unusable. Um, you've got oh well.
You can see what you've got here. all sorts of things including the over voltage cut off 210 volts that's set to overpower cutoff is kind of the total power of the unit because I've got three modules so that's the 450 watts and again with the over current 35 amps you can have over external temperature cut off, over board temperature cut off I Suppose that would only be used if the fans fail because the fans are automatic and keep the board temperature constant. I've got my fan control temperature to come on at 40 degrees. it automatically goes off again 10 degrees below that and then you can zero out the data and that's what I wanted to do.
actually I wanted to zero out the data. So let's M down to the zero the data uh, data zero and then I think you press OK it says okay and then long press to get out of that menu right Time to do an actual discharge. So positive goes into that left one. Hook that up to the positive of my battery. I'm using this Um 4 S2p Lithium-ion phosphate battery pack, right? That's positive and negative. Hooked up to my battery. So let's zoom in on the screen and start a discharge. I'm going to do this discharge at 3 amps constant current.
You can see the voltage of the battery as it's just hooked up with the unit not doing anything 13.1 volts. So we'll press the on off button that switches it on and the unit will pull three amps from the battery because the voltage will dip. There's the three amps it's pulling. Uh, it's 38.
Watts You can see the effective resistance and it's counting up the Watt hours and the milliamp hours. I Suppose what I'm more interested in is watching the temperature rise. Well, perhaps I need to raise the amps. So now the M button which is here moves the cursor on the top line there.
So that's three amps Now the plus button can take me to 4 amps and again to 5 amps. I'm pulling 5 amps now. That should make the Um transistors, the mosfets on the bottom of the boards warmer, and I've got my fan temp trigger set to 40 degrees. So when this gets to 40 degrees, we'll see the fans come on.
So all that power 63 watts is being dissipated. Um, well, almost all in those uh mosfets on the bottom of the boards. So I can feel that these heat sinks are now starting to get pretty warm. The board's temperature is up to nearly 39 degrees now.
so I'll just leave the camera running and we'll watch that go up to 40 degrees and then you'll see all the fans come on. So 39.67 8, 39.9 40 degrees The fans come on and they will stay on until the temperature Falls all the way back to 30 degrees because there's a 10 degree hysteresis built into this electronic DC load and I'll just catch the point where the fans go off. at 30 degrees, it's down to 31 degrees there. So yeah, I've been playing with this in constant current mode, constant resistance mode, constant power mode.
The only one that's behaved very strangely is constant voltage mode. but I don't think there. go the fans I don't think there's any point trying to cover that in this video because I'm going to keep this quite short. But if you're interested in seeing the problems this unit has when operating in constant voltage mode, then I'm quite happy to make another video about it in due course.
Now there is also an app. um, the screen unit there has Bluetooth in it. You can see it's very, very basic. Uh, really.
all it does is mirror some of the parameters, mirror some of the buttons so we can switch on and off. the um, well, switch on and off the unit. it's still on. In fact, if I switch it off, I'll do it remotely with the enter button I Think it is.
We should see these graphs fall so the voltage doesn't change much, but the current and power parameters fall to zero. Of course, switch it back on and those go back up. Now this does store the data in one second increments and you can export that as an XLS file, but that's pretty much all this does. It's really very basic and I think this app works with several different products that a torch make, so that's a little. Look a first look at the a torch dl24 MP I think it is uh, electronic DC load with consonant current, constant resistance, constant power, and also this quirky constant voltage mode like I Say, let me know in the comments below if you'd like to see this attempting to do constant voltage because I can tell you an ad doesn't do a very good job, That's it for this video. Cheerio.
A quick way to clear mAh/Wh is to hold + and – at the same time for a couple seconds. Big time saver over entering the menu and going all the way down.
Any idea what that last setting in the menu is? Something about no load current?
Also have you tried calibrating it? Mine came fairly accurate out of the box but could use a minor tweaking. Just don’t want to mess it up although I think you can change it back to the default original calibration.
Oh boy I’m so excited to see your opinion on this.
I got the 4 module 600W/40A version. Can’t get a 600W/40A electronic load for anywhere NEAR the $62 I paid on sale. Like not even in the same galaxy can you get an electronic load that powerful.
But….the design sucks. I mean it’s truly a poorly implemented idea that makes sense and doesn’t make sense. Compressing PCB’s together?! With a design that leaves some of them not level with the rest? WTF? I initially couldn’t draw more than 33/34A. Atorch told me to change the jumper configuration for 450W….which was an issue because at 40A I’d be drawing more than 480W…
So I went back over all the nuts and bolts and very carefully applied a bit more torque and found a couple that were just slightly less torqued than the rest. Keep in mind you have to do the upside down T configuration that’s 3 wide and 2 tall in the middle.
Nowhere in the literature do they say how to assemble the damn thing. I had considered the 2×2 square but that would still leave 2 modules not level with the other two but I figured I could mod the feet with shims. I think right now I have the middle unit on top of the outer modules which works ok. I always have the unit elevated an additional 12 inches off the ground because additional heat dissipation is absolutely necessary. The heat sinks are TERRIBLE and the fans not running until a set temp is a terrible design. I’d much rather have a variable speed fan that goes on over 10% of the units max rating or some 5-10 Celsius over ambient temp. Currently I have it set for I believe the lowest setting, 40 Celsius. Those motherfuckers are loud and for how loud they are they provide minimal cooling. 75% of my cooling comes from either a 90mm PC fan ducted through a Poptart box to go underneath the elevated PCB’s and another less powerful PC fan on top of that to get the power resistors on the board some airflow. Seems to work ok but if my testing is longer than a minute I use a quite powerful 12” desk fan on its highest setting when I’m doing anything over 200W. Over 400W I use two PC fans and the 12” desktop fan to keep things under 60 Celsius but it’s bloody freaking loud.
Really tempted to change the stock fans and honestly might look at the heatsinks as well. If I can find salvaged heatsinks that would fit I’d gladly swap them out. Would love to find some copper.
I think that is a DL24MP (The P is for Pink latest upgrade)
Can the settings be changed inside the app? What's in the "setup" (bottom left button) part?
Yes for the problems video. Also, is there no sense (4 wire) input?
Resistors probably are for ballancing mosfets becouse they are not ideal and have diffrent Rdson. Also you can mesure votage drop at 35A on input diode and calculate power on it Vf x 35A
hello Julian Ilett im looking for youre 3d files but i can find them at thingverse. i thouth the files where on there?
That reverse polarity input diode will not be carrying anything, until you reverse the polarity, then it protects the board by conducting hopefully enough to blow a fuse or trip.
is it acting as a DC resistive load or a PWM load? normal mosfets doesn't like the linear region, by what I understand.
I vote yes for a CV mode follow up!👍
I do find it funny how these chinese brands use the silliest names! Atorch, Junctek, Ultrafire etc.. This one is more relevant I guess 😁 That hysteresis on the fans could get annoying, I assume there is no control for speed.
You need to connect the inner connections to the outer ones to get the CV function to work!
Does this mean you can have one bit in each part of the modular shed, 🙂
You are missing the voltage sense wires (4 terminals into the board, the right hand two) you'll need those so that it's battery/source voltage measurement is not being affected by the current draw on the main lines. It's in the manual I think…
Can't believe you didn't pull out your thermal camera on this 🙂
Those 0.25 ohm resistors… are they for current sharing in the fets?
What did you test the constant voltage with ? For constant voltage you will need to use some sort of constant current source like say a solar PV panel else of course it can not do any constant voltage limiting. You can also test constant voltage if you add some resistive load in series with a voltage source like say adding an incandescent lamp in series with your battery or super capacitors. Maybe you already know all this and the DC Load can not maintain a constant voltage for some reason. If the other modes work not sure why constant voltage will not work.