The Bench-top Power Supply

So here is yet again another infrequent post in this mess called a blog. If I was a reader of it I would have lost interest long ago and forgot the address to this site but then again I am just one of those impatient sort of people. Yet with this in mind I do endeavour to be a little more constant with my posts. I have tried to make things a little bit more interesting by adding a new section which has got some of my photography of aircraft and aviation in general which I hope you enjoy.

Anyway by now you are asking why I named this post The Bench-top Power supply so I’ll get straight to the point: I needed something to do… so I made a Bench-top Power Supply. There are plenty of other things I could of made which would have been much more stimulating and interesting but the fact is having a variable power supply is so handy and I would add a few small features which I find come in handy.

I have used a standard step down transformer (240 VAC to 15 VAC), a bridge rectifier kit and a voltage regulator kit from Jaycar (www.jaycar.com.au). So thats the basic idea to a power supply, I then added terminals to plug in a dc supply to be regulated (i.e. Car battery) and a toggle switch to select between the ac and dc sources. I then added a tie switch which allows the power supply to be either floating, positive tied to earth or negative tied to earth. Call me lazy but it saves the extra wire to do the tying for you.

I hope to be a little more frequent now with this blog but no guarantees as I’m coming to the end of my avionics course so I’m a little busy. Anyways, Enjoy.