Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Converting a PC power supply -- Christo vd Merwe

The cold weather has it's advantages. One of them is that one gets time to do those things that you really want to, but put off because the weather is too nice to stay indoors.

This past weekend gave me the opportunity to do just that: to convert a PC power supply and document it for a website. I even had time to do some research on the web and found out how to modify the PSU to ensure that the output stays at 12V (or close to it), even when charging HARD. eg. I ran tests with the "mod" and also without it, and the outcome was an eye-opener. Without the mod, while charging 8 Ni-CD cells at 5A, the voltage dropped to just over 10V. With the mod, the voltage only dropped 0.1V (11.9V). Even when charging 15 Ni-CD cells (equiv. of 5 LiPo's) at 5A, the voltage drop was around 0.3V. I believe that this might be the answer to the Swallow charging problem that a few chaps mentioned, where the Swallow wouldn't reliably charge off a PSU.

Here is the link:




Best regards

Christo

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