Custom Power Suppies


buntz

Still Fresh
Joined
Jun 9, 2006
Messages
50
I have been reading as of late about how people are sturggling to find appropriatly rated ac adapters for their GP2X's. If I were to build some 3.3 volt 1.5 amp power supplies(regulated of course) would anyone be interested in buying one?
 
People have been struggling to find them? They are abundant. The only thing I read was that the connector would slip out occasionally, but that's an easy replacement too.
 
It's just that some of the adapters you get are total crap and won't even work properly because the voltage output isn't stable enough, so I could see some people being interested in a homebuilt adapter (provided it's in a decent enclosure and such). Throw a decent sized capacitor across the output and it should be fine.

For bonus points, set it up with 2 separable component parts... a DC or AC/DC ~12V to 3.3V high effeciency step down converter, and a power adapter that could be connected to it - this would let you run the thing off a separate battery... think a small sealed lead acid battery for movie watching / gaming away from a power supply (camping, etc?)
 
DTH : I havn't priced out the parts yet cause I didn't want to waste my time if no one was interested. I'd ship to anyone that wanted one, provided the customer pays the handling.

subcon959 : from what I've heard, people are buying adapters from radioshack casue they cant find the offical ones. And the ones you get there are cheap POS units. Where is this source for the offical adapters at that you know of?

Brad : I know that some of the adapters are crap and I want to imporve on this. That is why i wanted to know if there was interest. I plan on using some linear 3.3 volt 1.5 amp voltage regulators i have and testing that. It would be nice if you could power it from a 12 volt source like a car moron lighter, or, as you said, a seperate lead acid battery.

Maybe two different input plugs, one to plug into the wall, and another to plug into a 12 volt source. They would go to differnt parts of the circut of course. The 12 volt line to the regulator, and the 120 line to a transformer, then a rectifier, and some filtering. It would be a stable, reliable unit that looked not much different than a laptop power supply.
 
Yeah, the one thing to be careful with is the linear regulators that usually have a 1.5A or so max... these things essentially drop the voltage by varying resistance, which means they heat up proportional to the voltage drop over the whole range.
like... a 6V input, 3V output would burn half of the power in the regulator itself. This is why the switching ones are preferable if you have the option.
 
I was going to look into making them switching power suppiles, but I have some linear regulators laying around so I wanted to see what kind of performance I get with those first. They would be cheaper if I could use the linear regulators because the parts count is less, even if I had to add a fan to the design.
 
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