VHS super capacitors

VHS received a donation of some nice super capacitors a while back, attached to small PCBs. I had a look at them (with help from @Jarrett and @rsim) for a possible project and I just wanted to share my notes on the caps and boards for anyone who might be interested in them.

The boards look like this:

There’s a clear plastic bowl of them in the components area, maybe 100 boards or so.

The caps are ESHSR-0010C0-002R7, 10F 2.7V caps. There’s two on each board wired in parallel, so each board is 20F 2.7V. Here’s what the boards look like if you remove the caps:

The top image is flipped left-to-right to make tracing connections a little easier. The six pin chip is an ST1S06 buck converter. IIRC, the connector pinout in that image above is Vin, GND, Inhibit, GND, Vout.

One board I disassembled (to find a GND/Vin short) was shorted under the buck converter, others may have different issues, but I wouldn’t assume the boards are usable as is. Your best bet is probably to scavenge the caps off them, and maybe the buck converter if you’re inclined.

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Nice work Bruce, perhaps a kicad pcb is in order? The regulator seems well suited to a 3.3v from 5v application.

So a 2.7V cap is safe on say a 0.8v, 1.0v or 1.2v supply? I guess they must have a series resistor too, they’ll suck a bunch of current when empty. Too scary for me.