Modding a PC PSU to a bench PSU

In order to test and run my projects, I need a regulated power supply unit. Now, to buy a lab PSU it might cost several hundred pounds, and even the type that high schools have aren’t cheap. So I’m going to utilise a cheap source of power supplies- PCs- and modify them to suit my purposes.

Materials required:

• ATX PSU (preferably scrounged from an old computer, no need to unnecessarily spend money)
• LED
• 330Ω resistor
• 10Ω, ≥10W resistor
• terminal posts (4mm sockets)
• toggle switch
• heatshrink tubing.

Removing the PSU from the PC

This part’s easy; there are usually 4 screws holding the unit to the ATX case. Unscrew these, and open the case. Trace the cables from the PSU to the motherboard, and disconnect them. It should just then just slide out of it’s compartment and come straight out. Cut the connectors off the cables, leaving about 3 or 4 inches on the connectors for reuse. You now have a PSU ready to mod.

Inside the PSU

Inside the PSU case.

Unscrew the four screws on top of the PSU, holding the case together. This stage is probably the easiest to sort the wiring out, so sort the wires into colours; I had 4 orange wires, 13 black wires, 6 red wires, 5 yellow, and 1 white, 1 purple, 1 blue, 1 grey, and 1 green. You’ll probably get about the same, with possibly a pink replacing a red, or a brown replacing an orange. These are feedback wires, so just make sure they’re always attached to the correct color, and you can safely ignore them. Tape or rubber band each colour together, so they’re easier to deal with later.

The wires sorted into colours.

If it’s an old PSU, unscrew the PCB from the case and clean it off, with a blower brush, canned air or something. Then screw it back in.

Installing the new Hardware.

In a free area of the case (check inside as well, for heatsinks, fan casing, etc), drill holes that will take the terminal posts, the LED indicator, and the power switch. Line them up first by centrepunching the holes, then enlarging them with a drill.

The finished holes

Now insert your components into the correct holes, and you should have (depending on your design) something a little like this:

The face plate

Soldering it all up

Ok, now it’s time to start thinking about those wires again. here are the colours and their purpose:

• Black: 0V (Ground)
• Orange: +3.3V
• Red: +5V
• Yellow: +12V
• White: -5V
• Blue: -12V
• Grey: Power on indicator
• Green: On/off switch
• Purple: Standby indicator

And a picture, for you visual learners out there:

Bear in mind, the 5V (red) supply is the only one that is properly regulated, if you want the others to be also, you’ll have to do that separately. There are ways to do it, but I don’t think it’s necessary for mine yet. On V.2, perhaps.

When you have them all soldered up and heatshrunk, it should look somewhat like this:

Almost ready to put the lid back on

I accidentally cut the wires too short, so I extended them using mains rated wire. This was so I could just use one wire per terminal, and it can still take any high current. You may also notice that I haven’t used all the wires of some colours. I decided that only 4 per terminal was necessary. The two black terminals are for convenience, rather than to use up wire. One black wire went to the switch, another to the two LEDs.

The power resistor

It goes between a black wire and a red wire, and provides a small load for the PSU, if it requires one to stay switched on. Fix it to the PSU case with cable ties, as it can get quite hot and the case acts as a heatsink. You could use a thermal compound for increased heat transfer, but that’s probably unnecessary. Personally I didn’t use one, and just didn’t turn the unit on until the load was connected. You may feel safer having the flexibility that the resistor gives. It’s up to you.

And now you’re done

Now you’re finished, and once the case is on, it should look something like this:

Complete!

Sources

• WikiHow
• Instructables
• Chris Shadwick

© Robert Taylor 2007

Three days of work later, a new and improved version of Alone in the Mist has arrived… I call it, “Still Alone in the Mist.”

My titling ability knows no bounds.

Click on the link to see a larger version.

Still Alone in the Mist

Originally uploaded by Daegurth

If you don’t know what a paracord bracelet is, it’s simply a length of parachute cord woven into a wearable band that serves as an emergency supply of strong cordage that can be used in many situations, from wilderness camping to keeping a satellite in working order.

With an Opinel No.7 for size comparison.

I was using relatively narrow cord (I didn’t have any 550 to hand) and a wide buckle, so I was able to easily double up the length of cord stored on the bracelet. I’ve tied it off with a knot rather than melting it as per the instructions so that I have a little extra length to play with if I ever need to reweave it after use.

~Rob
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Now playing: Glee Cast – Alone
via FoxyTunes

A view of Clayton Terrace Road, Chopwell, through snow and mist.

It took me many shots and a very wet camera (it was snowing heavily… you just can’t see it well in the pic) to get the exposure and effect I wanted. Quite a bit of Photoshop after that, too.

Fence stump detail.

This seems to have been left behind when the coal railway was dismantled. Not quite as evocative as I wanted, but without using film (expensive!) I’m not sure how I could achieve that.

Upper Derwent Valley

A south-western view towards Consett and Derwent Reservoir. I had to run to get up the hill, out of those woods, and along the path to the right place before the sun disappeared entirely.

A stream in Chopwell Wood.

This was a very difficult shot, as there were large trees and deep icy water preventing me from getting the angles I really wanted.

I’m planning on going out again tomorrow since we had a pretty heavy snowfall for most of today; there are still several places I want to go to before I go back down to Hull.

~Rob

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Now playing: Loreena McKennitt – 02 Bonny Portmore
via FoxyTunes

The tree in Queen Victoria Square.

Whitefriargate's lights

Phone boxes in hull are cream/white, because they're Kingston Communications rather than BT.

They’re not spectacular, but I haven’t been taking the camera out anywhere near as much as I should have been, recently. I’m a little out of practise. In fact, I think I’ll go out now and see what there is to see.

~ Rob

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Now playing: Ensiferum – Twilight Tavern
via FoxyTunes

One of the guides told us that this would be focusing on replicating as closely as possible a small scale version of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, pronounced eat-er), the vast reactor being built in the south of France that should be the final experimental step before commercial fusion reactors start being built around 2050. This will allow them to have two- once ITER is operational- sets of data from identically fitted reactors, the only variable being size, thereby allowing approximate extrapolation for comparison with other variables affected by size, such as power output, density, temperature gradients, magnetic containment effectiveness, etc. More data points would, of course, be preferable, but as each reactor costs several billion Euros/Pounds/Dollars to build, this seems unlikely to happen any time soon. The next step after ITER should be DEMO, a series of even larger demonstration reactors built in the seven ITER participants- Europe, the US, South Korea, China, Japan, Russia, and India. These should be the first reactors to run commercially, and will be the final stage before commercial deuterium-tritium fusion reactors start being built worldwide in around 2050.

Back to the present day; we got a minibus from Uni at about 8am for the roughly 4 hour drive. We arrived at Culham Science Park at around one o’clock, having stopped for lunch at a service station. After recieving our ID badges from the reception building, we drove around to the first stop; the building containing MAST. It’s also home to Culham Lightning, who were testing lightning strikes on aircraft nose cones at the time of our vist, so added to the huge amount of machinery and systems in there, things were pretty noisy. First we were given a short presentation on fusion, but as the majority of vistors there are A-level students (11th/12th graders US equivalent), this didn’t expand at all on the introductory lecture we’d arranged the previous week from Professor Howard Wilson, a plasma physicist at York University and a researcher at Culham. Here are some pictures from the presentation room:

MAST reactor in operation- it's a miniature sun.

Slice of one of the field shaping electromagnets. The holes are for cryogenic refrigeration.

One of the high power cables. I'm not sure the picture does its size justice.

We then moved onto taking a look at MAST itself. Several people were working on it at the time, so photo opportunities were limited:

The control system for injecting gas into MAST.

MAST neutral beam injection and analysis ports.

Neutral Beam Injection is one way of feeding deuterium into the reactor. It works by ionising deuterium and accelerating it into a chamber of gaseous deuterium. It hits the atoms and accelerates them towards the reaction chamber at a few km/s. The other method is to freeze deuterium and tritium into small (a couple of mm) pellets at about 10K (-263°C; 1K=1°C), which are shot into the centre of the chamber at several hundred m/s. Current tokamaks fire 10 pellets a second for 10 seconds, whereas ITER should be capable of 16/s for an hour, in line with its much greater energy output and operating period.

Laser interferometer for measuring plasma density inside MAST.

After this we moved onto JET, which was further into the science park, and allowed me to get a picture of the type of building the reactors are in. Very unglamorous for the technology that seems to be in line to solve the world’s energy needs within a few decades.

The unassuming MAST building exterior.

Once inside the JET building- which, unlike the MAST building, is entirely dedicated to the JET reactor- there were many more interesting things to see:

Beryllium is being used in many reactor components due to its ability to handle extreme temperatures.

Training duplicate of the JET reactor allows easy experimentation.

Remote handling access port.

Quickly-snapped picture of the remote handling access port on the training reactor model. It’s used to get the remote handling equipment inside the reactor. There are two, at opposite sides, allowing two operations to proceed simultaneously, shortening refit and repair downtime.

Remote handling manipulator.

The end of the remote handling equipment- a long, multiple-articulated computer-controlled robotic arm mounted on a crane- that does the actual manipulating. it is operated either by computer, or by remote operator who uses a similar-looking piece of equipment to convert his large hand and arm movements into the delicate and precise motions required intside the torus itself.

The real JET.

JET itself. A huge piece of machinery- the largest fusion reactor in the world- but tiny by commercial requirement standards. ITER will dwarf it, and DEMO will be even larger again. That yellow wall, by the way, isn’t a wall. It’s a 2-metre-thick concrete-and-steel sliding door, to protect the operators from the high-energy neutrons being flung out by JET. ITER and subsequent reactors will have built-in shielding, so that they are safe to operate in a commercial environment- which is what all of this is leading up to.

The control centre.

The vast amount of computers- which go off the left, right and back of the picture, and the room to the right of this is filled with servers and hard drives to store all the data about every JET experiment in its 25+ year history. As this is a joint European venture, teams of scientists from other nations will come up with some parameters- certain temperatures, fuel ratios, desities, etc- for an experiment and ask CCFE to include it in its next campaign. They search the archives to see if it has been done before. If it has, they pass along the data. If not, then they include it in either the next campaign or the one after. This room holds the on-site staff monitoring the experiment, and sometimes foreign teams who come over to watch their experiment run. It’s possible for them to stay at home if they prefer, however, and watch the experiment proceed over the internet.

Well, that’s it. Hope you enjoyed seeing the current state of fusion technology. I firmly believe that it’s going to solve most, if not all, of our energy problems. Perhaps not overnight, but sooner rather than later. And the best news of all is that it’s carbon (and other greenhouse gases)-neutral, we have enough fuel to last for centuries, probably millenia (half a bath of seawater and  one laptop battery contain enough deuterium and lithium (which, when reacted with the neutrons generated by the fusion, produces tritium) to supply a person’s energy needs for a year) and produces no radioactive waste other than some of the reactor components when it’s eventually decommissioned.

Feel free to leave comments or questions.

~Rob

A few basic tips on logo design:

• K.I.S.S. – a logo is simply an immediately recognisable symbol for what it’s representing. Don’t use any complicated pictures.
• Delete every element you can until you’re left with only the necessary bare minimum. It needs to be impactful and busy designs are not.
• Is it equally legible when printed in black and white? Remember that it won’t necessarily be used in full Technicolor all the time.
• Ensure any text is easily readable, even in a hurry from a distance. It’s all about sticking in peoples’ mind.
• Pay attention to typefaces- what kind of impression are you trying to give? If you’re more about heritage or tradition (or trying to imply such) then you might want a serif font like Times New Roman. Modernity is generally implicated with clean, sans-serif fonts. For my final design on the HUPS logo, I used both Verdana and DejaVuSans extra light. Different font weights provide contrast which is attention-grabbing.
• Don’t feel the need to be too literal with logos; if you look at the contact sheet below, you can see I went from literal at the top with my concepts of physics- quantum and classical mostly, with the particles and apples- to more abstract as I removed the elements that were congesting the pieces and ended up with ideas that are much more recognisable (I’ve seen a group of people in hoodies with this logo on, it’s very effective).
• Don’t feel as though you must include a graphic in your logo- many very effective logos (Twitter, Facebook, and many more) are text-only, as it’s so easy to remember. Unfortunately, they can also be difficult to design- you need to really step your game up when doing text-only, as these websites show: The Logo Factory, LogoMoose Blog. You must generally invent a new font in order to make the word that much more unique and recognisable in context.
• Carefully consider the potential uses of your logo- monitors, leaflets, and billboards all have different strengths and weaknesses in terms of legibility of things like serifs, drop shadows, and gradients. If in doubt, leave it out. In logo design, less is almost always more.
• If you’re using photoshop, don’t go overboard with the filters- we can all recognise glowing edges and lens flares, they’re not interesting. (Yes, I know I have a lens flare in the HUPS contact sheet, but that particular design wes never intended to be taken seriously.)

Other than the basic stuff, there are two main parts to logo design. On the one hand is the planning of your logo and the theory of graphic design. Then there is the artistic side, the drawing from inspiration to create something meaningful.

First, how do you go about conceptualising a design when presented with a minimalist brief?

• Find out as much about the organisation that you’re designing for as possible; product(s), size, location, target audience, etc.
• Look at competitors’ logos and see what angle they’re going for; note typefaces, graphics, colour, sizes, shapes, etc.
• Consider what other services target the same demographic- for (perhaps unfair and stereotyped, but often true) example a trendy coffee shop must try to appeal to the netbook/MacBook crowd- mostly 18-30, generally in education or one of the more creative vocations. They will be attracted by either clean lines and simplistic design, or, until a new vogue comes along, by grungy (but not necessarily cluttered nor monochrome) and “arty” ideas. These are the kind of thought processes you must develop, effectively “who is the intended audience? Who is targeting them? How?” You should also take into account colour schemes, font families, etc when analysing in this way.
• Alternatively you could attempt to subvert the accepted look in order to stand out and be more visually interesting- but that’s an incredibly risky plan and could heavily backfire- misinterpretation of a logo could spell death for an organisation. It’s almost always better to stick to logical, identifiable tropes, although clichés should be avoided if possible.
• Produce several different designs, and present your best two or three to your client (if you are working for one) with some notes on each one. Bear in mind that if a design needs more than a couple of sentences’ worth of explanation for the client- and any preliminary testers you show it to like friends and family- it’s probably too complex for use as a logo. Don’t feel insulted if the client doesn’t like any of them, and be prepared to make alterations- even if you think the designs are perfect, clients are picky creatures and usually have difficulty communicating their vision precisely.

Now you have the  concept for the logo in mind, where do you start? Where’s the inspiration?

• Everywhere! It’s a cliché, but you can find logo ideas everywhere- trees, buildings, people, shapes, colour… the list is infinite. It’s just a case of wrapping your head around a new way of looking at the world. Take note of the details too, not just the overall appearance.
• Look at as many examples of graphic design and digital art as possible; in magazines, on the internet, anywhere… something might trigger an idea.
• Could the word(s) you’re working with be formed into a shape? Would that shape relate to who/what your logo is for?
• Don’t be afraid to draw something silly- it might trigger a better idea. Plus, you might get through 10 or 20 revisions of your final logo, and any start is a good one. Try not to gaze numbly at a blank page/screen.

Well, there you go. That’s about all I can think of at the minute. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but if you’re struggling with logo creation- or maybe some other aspect of graphic design, hopefully this is some use to you. Have fun (if you’re using an Adobe product, how can you not?), and good luck with whatever you’re doing.

~Rob
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Now playing: Dark Tranquility – Focus Shift
via FoxyTunes

In general, then, definitely a big positive step for Microsoft from what i’ve seen and read so far. Can’t wait to live with it a little, see what’s what. Nevertheless, while I may be a confirmed Microsoft man, I’m not going to entirely sign over my computer to them again; I’m going to install Linux Mandriva on the second partition.

Now, I’m going  to do a little more exploring before bed.

~Rob
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Now playing: Amon Amarth – Cry of the Black Birds
via FoxyTunes

You honestly, hand-on-heart, look at your new rebranded Motorola Sholes with the Android 2 OS and see an iPhone competitor? Now don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand the iPhone either, but if you’re targeting the iPhone demographic- sixteen to thirty-somethings who value convenience, ease-of-use and style over freedom, power and versatility- then rebranding the Sholes was entirely the wrong way to go about it. I know retro is apparently cool, but Motorola have managed to find the exact shade of grey, squareness of buttons, and gold trim so that it looks like a cheap calculator from the 80s. I mean, gold? Seriously? I was all ready to believe the hype and celebrate the dawn of a potential iPhone killer (I have no illusions that my beloved Nokia n900 will be one ), but alas, I was misguided and foolish.

It’s not only the styling that damages the Droid’s chances. Having seen pictures of the Android 2 (codename “Éclair”) OS, I’m torn. I’m disappointed by its lack of imagination- if people want the iPhone OS, they’ll buy the iPhone. But on the other hand, you could argue that the iPhone’s functionality and accessibility combined with Android’s relative openness and freedom is a thing of beauty. However, the problem comes when you consider that most people who want the former already have iPhones, or will get iPhones due to the depth of the device’s market penetration- they’ve tried their friends’ iPhones, they’ve seen the adverts, they know that there are at least six times as many apps- the clincher in many circumstances- for the iPhone as for Android. On the other end of the scale, there are the people who want power and the freedom to use it as they will- but Android doesn’t exactly have the best track record of complete freedom, hence the existence of the rooting (jailbreaking for Android) community.

So in the end, the Droid seems to be left in something of a no-man’s land. It doesn’t quite cater to the people it most wants to, but neither is it enough for the people it seems theoretically more suited to. Is this the end for the Droid, before it’s even begun? I don’t think so; there is a median demographic, one that values a good quality UI, but doesn’t place quite as much emphasis on style. They want a modicum of freedom to customise, but don’t want to be in over their heads. They are the average people, non-technical, perhaps believing that the iPhone is as good as Apple claim yet uninterested in their draconian practices, so looking for alternatives. Maybe they specifically want something more like a Palm, HTC, Nokia or Blackberry- which I consider to be the Droid’s real competitors- but want more power and streamlining, and if Gauss is to be believed, there are many more of them than there are of either iFanatics or freedom fighters. The Droid could be looking forward to a bright future- but as a feature-laden powerhouse, the Android equivalent of the Maemo-powered n900 tablet, and not as a direct iPhone alternative.

Promotional Page: http://phones.verizonwireless.com/motorola/droid/

Droid Pictures: http://phandroid.com/2009/10/22/motorola-droid-specs-pics-features-at-motorola-com/

Android 2.0 Pictures: http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/10/16/android-2-0-screenshot-walkthrough/

Nov. 6th edit: Droid Hands-on Review: http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20091104/motorolas-droid-is-smart-success-for-verizon-users/