Here’s a destructive teardown of an automotive in-tank turbine fuel pump, used on modern Petrol cars. These units sit in the tank fully immersed in the fuel, which also circulates through the motor inside for cooling. These pumps aren’t serviceable – they’re crimped shut on both ends. Luckily the steel
Since I’ve discovered some nice high power PSUs in the form of Playstation 3 PSUs, it’s time to get a new Bench PSU Build underway! I’ve gone for the APS-227 version as it’s got the 32A rail. This makes things slightly beefier overall, as the loading will never be anywhere
I was recently given a Sony PS3 with a dead disc drive, and since I’m not a console gamer I figured I’d see if there were any handy parts inside. Turns out these units contain a rather nice SMPS, the Sony APS-231 with a high power 12v rail, rated at
As I mentioned in the previous post, these heaters have a standard interface that’s used for control & diagnostics, the W-Bus. This is transmitted over the K-Line of the vehicle bus, and all heaters, regardless of firmware modifications done by the various car manufacturers respond to this interface. Official Webasto
Continue readingJaguar S-Type Aux Heater / Webasto Thermo Top V Part 2 – W-Bus Diagnostics
This is a chip aimed at the automotive market – this is a low power voltage regulator for supplying power to microcontrollers, for instance in a CD player. The TDA3606 is a voltage regulator intended to supply a microprocessor (e.g. in car radio applications). Because of low voltage operation of
Continue readingIC Decap – TDA3606 Multi Regulator With Battery Sense
Here’s a piece of tech that is growing all the more important in recent times, with devices with huge battery capacities, a quick charger. This unit supports Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 3 standard, where the device being charged can negotiate with the charger for a higher-power link, by increasing the bus
Continue readingAnker PowerPort Speed 5 USB Rapid Charger Teardown
I was recently given a pretty nice LED backlit 1080p LG monitor, with the instruction that it wouldn’t power on correctly. The monitor would power on as far as the standby light, but when fully powered on, would flash the backlight momentarily then shut down. A power supply issue was
Here’s a cheap PSU from the treasure trove of junk that is eBay, rated at a rather beefy 400W of output at 12v – 33A! These industrial-type PSUs from name brands like TDK-Lambda or Puls are usually rather expensive, so I was interested to find out how much of a
Continue readingeBay Chinese Chassis Power Supply S-400-12 400W 12v 33A
I have found myself needing some more in the way of High Voltage supplies of late, with the acquisition of the new He-Ne laser tubes, so I went trawling eBay for something that would be suitable to run these tubes. (I currently only have a single He-Ne laser PSU brick,
In my mind, the most dangerous thing onboard any boat is the LPG system, as the gas is heavier than air, any leaks tend to collect in the bilges, just waiting for an ignition source. To mitigate this possibility, we’re fitting a gas monitoring system that will sound an alarm
On the quest to get things on board replaced that are heavy users of power, the monitor in the main cabin was next. The original CCFL-backlit monitor was very heavy on 12v power, at 5A. This meant falling asleep watching TV would result in severely flattened batteries. Replacement with a
Continue readingViewSonic VA2232W-LED Monitor 12v Conversion
Compressed air is a rather useful power source, especially when all maintenance is done by the on board crew instead of by boatyards. Screwfix had a good deal on a 50L 3.5CFM air compressor, to save space this has been permanently mounted in a free space & air will be
Now the controllers have arrived, I can rejig the supplies to have proper thermal control on their cooling. Here’s the top off the PSU. The board has been added to the back panel, getting it’s 12v supply from the cable that originally fed the fan directly. Luckily there was just
Finally, after a couple of weeks wait time, the fan controllers for the power supplies have arrived. They’re small boards, which is good for the small space left inside the case of the supply. Here they are. I’m not certain what the pair of potentiometers are for – there’s no
Continue readingDIY SMPS Fan Speed Control – The Controllers
I’ve been meaning to sort some local graphs out for a while for the radiation monitor, and I found a couple of scripts created by a couple of people over at the uRadMonitor forums for doing exactly this with RRDTool. Using another Raspberry Pi I had lying around, I’ve implemented
Finally, here’s the last part of the Rigol 12v DC Power Supply project, the linear post regulation section to remove some of the ripple. I have made a couple of layout adjustments since the last post about this part of the project – a little more filtering on the DC
Continue readingRigol DS1054Z DC Power Supply – Linear Post Regulation
Since I fitted my scope with a SMPS based 12v input supply, there has been a noise problem on very low volts/div settings, this noise isn’t present on the mains supply, so I can only think it’s coming from the switching frequencies of the various DC-DC modules I’ve used. Because
Continue readingRigol DS1054Z 12v Power Supply Noise Filtering
As the crimp tool for the PSU connector in the Rigol scope is a very expensive piece of hardware, I decided to use pre-crimped terminals, from an ATX power connector. (They’re the same type). Here’s the partially completed loom, with the 13 cores for the power rails. The 14th pin
While searching around for regulators to convert my new scope to 12v power, I remembered I had some DC-DC modules from Texas Instruments that I’d got a while ago. Luckily a couple of these are inverting controllers, that will go down to -15v DC at 15W/3A capacity. I’ve had to
Since everything in my shack is run from 12v, I thought it would be handy to convert my new scope to 12v as well, as 99% of the places I find myself needing test gear are off grid, with no access to mains supplies. Here’s the factory mains SMPS unit
I recently ordered a PSU to run one of the TVs I converted to 12v operation, and being an older TV, it’s a fairly heavy load at 6.5A. eBay to the rescue again, with a cheap 10A rated supply. Like all similar supplies these days, it’s a SMPS unit, and
I recently dug out my other card printer to fit it with a 12v regulator, (it’s 24v at the moment), and figured I’d do a teardown post while I had the thing in bits. This is a less industrial unit than my Zebra P330i, but unlike the Zebra, it has
Following on from the earlier power tests on my Baofeng HTs, here’s the readings from the Wouxun KG-UV950P. Power is a little lower than specified, but this is probably due to the supply voltage being a bit less than 13.8v. These readings were taken at a supply voltage of 12.88v.
I’ve noticed that the RF power output from the Chinese radios can be quite variable from model to model, and even from individual radios of the same model & batch. I’ve bought an RF Power meter (GY561) to do some tests on the HTs I have at present. All tests
Recently I decommissioned some networking equipment, and discovered the power supplies in some switches were single rail 12v types, with a rather high power rating. I figured these would be very good for powering my Ham radio gear. They’re high quality Delta Electronics DPSN-150BP units, rated at a maximum power
Continue readingCisco PSU Hack & Switched Mode PSU Background