Almost a Power Supply

Every electronics project needs power. You can spend a lot of time building supplies or a lot of money on batteries. If you build projects to use in your lab you can use one supply with a lot of projects plugged into it. Then just cable up the project and plug it in. In this project I describe a way that I have done this that I thinks works out pretty well. You still need some sort of power supply ( there are lots on instructables, many base on old computer powere supplies ) I use mostly salvage parts, but you can adapt it to other parts, and buy them if you wish. When you are done you can use "free" cables to connect up to 6 projects at a time to power.

Step 1 Materials

Cable and Plug: I use one for each project they are the PS2 style Mouse and keyboard cables. People are throwing a lot of these out, fairly easy ( at least for me ) to find.

Jacks I use 6 per system I get them from old computer mother boards. The ones I used were dual plugs one on top of the other. So I can plug in up to 6 projects at once.

.1inch perforated board ( perfboard a pretty standard electronics item )

Case for the whole thing, I had one around.

Power supply, I wired up to one that I had, a computer power supply can be useful as they often supply +12, -12, and +5 volts. There are several power supply projects on instructables, some are very good.

The cable have n wires plus a ground the ground is a shield for the other wires, I did not use it. The other wires are colored.

Comments

[jdege]

I finally broke down and bought a benchtop adjustable power supply on EBay. The one I got has three channels - one fixed 5V@2A and two adjustable 0-15V@0-1A. The two adjustable outputs can be either voltage limited or current limited, and can be combined to provide one output at 0-30V@0-1A or 0-15V@0-2A. It's the most-used piece of equipment on my bench. An enormous improvement over batteries and wall-warts.

[bombmaker2]

how much

[jdege]

They're not exactly cheap. Even on eBay, you'll pay $100-$200.

Bench power supplies

[uberdum05]

I got one for my birthday a few years ago from maplin and it was only £60, 0-35V adjustable @ 0-2.5A, fixed 5V/12V outputs at 500mA. Still going strong apart from current limit doesn't like limiting low-current loads

[bombmaker2]

I figured that

[scratchr]

one word: LM317

[pfred2]

That looks like a part designation number. I used one of those in this:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Dual-POS-NEG-Power-Supply/

LM723 is another number:

http://www.instructables.com/id/300-Watt-Linear-Power-Supply/

Might be a bit extreme in some situations.

[mrmoose3]

Great idea! Especially if your working on more than one project at a time.

[!Andrew_Modder!]

cool in a sweet yet odd yay :-)

[GorillazMiko]

Nice! You might want to fix up the 2nd paragraph in step 1, there is a lot of those A symbol things.

[russ_hensel]

Yes, I took them out a couple of times, but they keep coming back, why? Got me.

[Hands Without Shadows]

Keep in mind most computer power supplies have +12v, +5v, +3.3v, -3,3v, -5v, -12v, and that you can mix and match these. ie: +12v and +5v results in 7v. I have a power supply with 12v, 5v, and 3.3v taps and it really is invaluable. I prefer 4mm bullet connectors myself but thats personal preference.