Saturday, May 29, 2021

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ZK-4KX (PSU II)

I'm enamoured with the idea of having a purpose built PSU on the lab bench - it seems that this is quite a rite of passage for the home electronics hobbyist. We all have different needs and/or wants for such a device, and also there is a lot to be gained from designing, building and debugging your own PSU.

To that end, on an earlier blog I fleshed out the idea of a switching voltage regulator such as the LM2576 or LM2596 to reduce a 20V input (e.g. from a computer AC/DC supply) to say 8V and then using a linear regulator (less efficient, but nicer output) such as the L7805 for instance to make a stable 5V available for the bench.



Of course, there are also "pre-built" switching voltage regulators, and recently I took delivery of a ZK-4KX unit which I want to test for this PSU project.

Advantages (if it works) include protection, displays, current limiting, etc., but it also just might lend the whole project a bit of legitimacy so that people don't focus so much on the hotglue disaster likely to plague "my side" of the PSU.

In this video I spend most of my time testing and then complaining about a shonky batch of L7805 linear voltage regulators, but in the end I think the overall concept will work.

It's also worth noting that there is an overall fault in my electron train - once which I don't spot even though the train hits me, oscillating like crazy, at around 20V. It took a child's wind up clock to remind me that the obvious things are often the easiest to overlook.



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