On Mar 3, 9:14 am, PeterD wrote:
On Fri, 2 Mar 2007 01:55:22 -0500, "rkremser"

wrote:
I know there are many maxim chips that are very much suitable for
the application but for some reason i feel somewhat hesitant to go the route
of a single IC. thanks in advance

Use the Maxim solutions. THey are the best possible solution. Sure,
you could 'roll your own' with discrete components, but that's the
hard way, will be less reliable, and probably be *much* larger in the
end.


Sure rolling your own may be more work, but I doubt that it will be
any larger and is ,in fact, likely to be smaller. I have done a
number of PS designs and they mostly were smaller than off the shelf
designs, also cheaper. But the work is not trivial, even with a
design example. In automotive apps (not sure how similar go-carts are
to autos in this regard) you need a lot of input protection way beyond
anything you see in other environments. Unless a module is designed
for that it is likely to fail at a high rate. This applies to both
bought modules and self designed ones.