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  • Author Author: dougw
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PC Power Supply - Upcycle & Repurpose

dougw

Intro

This section of the Upcycle Design Challenge is about upcycling and repurposing a PC power supply. Specifically I want to turn the power supply from an obsolete PC into a useful bench power supply, complete with meters and binding post banana jacks.

This is my 5th blog in this design challenge and I haven't even done an unboxing blog - because the challenge kit has not arrived yet. Fortunately these sections don't need the kit components.

image

The Teardown

The PC chassis is too big to use as a power supply chassis, so I wanted to explore hacking the chassis down to a reasonable size while retaining the power supply mounts. This is a video of the attempt...

This work shows what I was trying to do and that it is likely feasible, but it was turning out to be problematic to make the result look like a polished instrument, so I changed to a different approach. This new approach uses more 3D printed parts to make things fit nicely.

PC Bench Supply Build

Discussion

Converting a PC power supply into a bench power supply turned out to be much more work than I had expected. Doing metal work without the right tools and skill set pretty much explain why I spent so much time, but I definitely gained an appreciation of what it takes to work with sheet metal. Ultimately I opted to 3D print some of the parts, to make sure the finished instrument would be presentable. The new approach still took a significant amount of work, but it turned out well. The final power supply features 6 USB charging ports, 3 volt meters and 3 ammeters in addition to the traditional banana jack binding posts. I am happy with the supply, it will find uses when I need computer voltages with significant current.

Links:

Upcycle The Beast - Blog 1

Serendipitous Salvage - Blog 2

What is on those old disks?

Mr. Pentium

PC based bench supply

Curiosity Nano Unboxing

 Curiosity Nano Programming 

 Super-cycle Design Challenge 

 Upcycle IoT Design Challenge 

Upcycle IoT Design Challenge Info

Parents

  • Hello Doug,

    Not that surprised you had so much trouble trying to re-work sheet metal - a really tricky task but you gave it a good go !

    I'm never sure where one would use a PC supply based bench PSU - the lack of fast acting and adjustable current limiting coupled with the ability to spit out a few hundred watts at 12V makes them a bit risky for most development work.

    It's a shame because I have a considerable number of old PCs and I'll end up paying to get rid of them !

    MK

Comment

  • Hello Doug,

    Not that surprised you had so much trouble trying to re-work sheet metal - a really tricky task but you gave it a good go !

    I'm never sure where one would use a PC supply based bench PSU - the lack of fast acting and adjustable current limiting coupled with the ability to spit out a few hundred watts at 12V makes them a bit risky for most development work.

    It's a shame because I have a considerable number of old PCs and I'll end up paying to get rid of them !

    MK

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