Cheap $16 - 12V 700W PSU

[brantgoose]

Hello my friends. They sell this 12V 700W on amazon for cheap. $16
I've had my wiring torn apart for a couple months now because I added a dual extruder board and had a setback with my plugs, I didn't want to power another 50W over the two 18g wires . I plan to get a bigger heated bed so was going to add another ATX supply I already owned but it would have been a tight fit and added even more wires to my bird's nest of wires.


One thing I hope is that I won't have to change any firmware to get the 2nd extruder to work because there probly is none for a Printrbot simple with dual extruder.

I haven't tried powering it up yet. I made my own set of screw terminal connectors mounted in a wood block i'm waiting for some super glue to dry.

Here's how they say to turn it on...

[brantgoose]

Sweet...Just tried it and it turns on.
Seems to get pretty warm and I was barely running anything. Just plugged into the A/C outlet shut off it gets a 10W reading on the kill-a-watt meter.

[Mooselake]

I'd recommend adding either a fuse or automotive circuit breaker to the output; short this sucker and you'll have some serious problems. OTOH, figure out how the redundant PS works and you could pair them and have your own RPO 3D printer. Back in my ISP days, when monster disks were a couple GB, I ran several rackmount SCSI disk arrays with triple redundant power supplies. Turned out that the redundant power had more issues than the box full o disks. Never lost power, but had problems with the individual supplies working fine individually but reporting they were dead when plugged into the RPO backplane.

Otherwise could be a great find. There's quite a few replacement parts for old (ancient by PC standards) servers available from the junk^^^^electronic salvage companies. Perhaps you could order a D360G5 server to go with it, think how fast you could run Cura or slic3r on it!

Likely the supply always provides some power, why it draws 10W when switched off. These things are designed to be rack mounted in controlled environments (think air conditioned computer rooms), and are from the days when they were more worried about computer power than utility cost. In other words, not really designed for power efficiency. I wouldn't worry too much about it; even in Mooseland where electricity is over 25 cents per kwh you'll still spend more on plastic and printer cost/hour than you'll pay for electricity.

Kirk

[brantgoose]

Thanks Moose. Well I wouldn't want to put another of these power supplies. But I would like to add a battery backup. I found this... https://powerwerx.com/automatic-redunda ... r-selector I wouldn't spend $70 on it cause i'm not rich thou maybe it woundn't be too hard to make my own circuit that would allow me to add a battery if i used a buck modulator to lower the voltage of the battery to below the psu voltage. I'm sure some more components would need to be added. I'll keep searching for a solution. I'm not a genius tho.

I found this here... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r01k5FLnG8 and it looks pretty easy.
I found these Rectification circuits on ebay. ""

or theres these that are a lot cheaper....
I don't know what would happen.

[brantgoose]

I desoldered a socket off an old motherboard. Not sure if it'll work or not but i'm going to hook up an inverter to it and power a bunch of stuff for a while before I catch my 3d printer on fire. Making this socket was a PITA and not really worth it but whatever. HP also made a 1000W psu and it's pretty cheap as well and there is this socket adapter for it. Pretty nice.

[brantgoose]

I finally got all my hardware wired up i think and now I am trying to print but it isn't seeing any extruders. I guess I will try to upgrade the firmware.

[brantgoose]

All night long messing with it and I got both hotends to heat up just now. After I found out a thermistor needed to be plugged into both thermistor ports on the extruderboard even if your only using one it was easy but it just took me all night long to find that out.