Thanks, guys! Yeah, even my step-son came home last night with his girlfriend and saw it on the kitchen table. He came into the living room where I was and asked, "did you make a power supply inside a cigar box?". I replied, "yeah, man" to which he said, "that's awesome!" :bigsmile:
If you happen to have them lying around. I think I have about 50 of them so anyone within 3 hours drive of me can have one for free. It’ll help clearing the crap from my house.
Power supplies need a certain minimum load to work properly. The min. load for mine is around 0.8 amps. Thus if you plan on powering LED’s or other such low-power device exclusively, you’ll need a resistor to provide a load. Otherwise you will damage the PSU.
A meaty 10-Ohm, 10 watt resistor from Radio Shack is a good choice. Wire it across 12 volt and ground.
interesting! I wonder if one of these could be used to do home anodising? Most guides I read specify a certain amount of current per surface area, whereas these are voltage controlled instead. It certainly would make it a whole lot cheaper if it would work.
That greatly depends on the size of item being anodized. I have read through post that did use a computer power supply for anodizing with small pieces. I use my automotive battery charger to anodize with. It works well with a small host like a cut down mini mag with very good results. I tried a full sized 2D Maglite one time and didn’t turn out so well. The current wasn’t high enough for the amount of surface area in the mag.
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Rit clothes dye from wally world, Sunshine Orange.
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Also, you can easily get voltages that aren't officially supplied by the PSU. For example using the +12v as positive and +5v as negative will give you the difference between them, in that case 7 volts.
Those supplies should NOT be used with anything expensive and valuable, such as expensive hobby chargers.
See this review of one of them to see why: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=324
I’m not going to quote the full review here, but this picture of ripple on 12V rail should be enough:
That’s at 300W btw… Here’s for comparison Corsair AX1200i at 1200W:
If they are no good for use with expensive electronics then there are a whole lot of computers (lots of expensive components in there) costing hundreds and thousands of dollars at risk that use them. Someone had better tell Apple, Dell, HP, Compaq, Asus, Gateway, Toshiba, etc...
I completed the wiring over the weekend and fired it up last night. Works a treat! Whisper quiet and puts out voltage in my choice of 24v/12v/7v/5v/3.3v
Fired up the new IMAX B8+ and it works great. Looking forward to going through my cells and running discharge tests to filter out the older bad ones from laptop pulls and to get some good matched sets. :)
Is the 3.3v output close enough for driving a single emitter? Say testing with a single Li-Ion max 4.5v driver. If not, would you use the 5v output with a resistor or something?