5, 12, or 24 volts off a laptop brick. It went up the ladder instead of the steel bench supply, and lasted until the voltmeter drifted.
About the project
I was testing every pixel product before it went up and re-testing segments after they were installed, and each test meant hauling a steel bench power supply up a ladder or cobbling a test rig together out of bits of the rig I was in the middle of installing. It took a long time every time, and I was doing it constantly. On-site pixel work runs on 5, 12, or 24 volts DC. That is all I needed in the air.
I built a portable supply around a buck-boost converter, printed a PLA enclosure for it, and ran it off a laptop brick. I left a direct USB-C port off the chassis because my print tolerances could not hold one cleanly. Assembling it was a fight. The banana plugs needed an awkward ring-crimp split, and threading the retaining nuts inside that footprint was miserable.
The little box replaced the bench rig completely. It came with me to Que Bueno Suerte! to check blackout pixel tubes on the mezzanine before I cut a single one. It survived a few years of site work until the voltage meter drifted and I retired it.
- FDM 3D Printing
- SolidWorks
- Custom Fabrication
- Power Distribution
- Rapid Prototyping
