Replacing All of Those Pesky Power Adapters?

bobrobins asks: "I'm sitting in a hotel with a desk full of chargers: laptop, mobile phone, walkman, camera, electric razor in the bathroom, and a laptop supply for the plane, oh and one for the new sony speakers. Before you say too much I've been on the road for a long time and need them all! There must be more gadget geeks out there with a better solution, really all i need is a single charger/power supply that can charge all of these maybe 2 at a time. Any ideas appreciated - my back hurts from lugging this lot around!"

Comments

Targus universal adapter

[hfcs]

About as close as I've seen is this. You can buy other power tips that change the voltage and connector as appropriate. The list of compatible devices and their appropriate adapter tips is here for phones, pda, & printers and laptops. As a bons, the same tips work with their airline adapter.

No affiliation with them, just a customer.

I have...er, had...this problem with my desktop...

[cr0sh]

It seemed like I had a ton of things running on DC power adaptors - ZIP drive, scanner, phone, KVM switcher, fan for my monitor (yeah, it gets pretty damn hot) - so I decided to see what a solution would be. I first looked at my power requirements:

1. ZIP Drive - 5VDC, 1 amp
2. Scanner - 15VDC, 1 amp
3. Phone - 12VDC, 300 milliamps
4. KVM Switcher - 9VDC, 600 milliamps
5. Monitor fan - 12VDC, ??? milliamps

Ok, so what I needed was something that would supply at least 12VDC, at least 2 Amps worth - if I could get 5VDC at an Amp or so, that would be cool, too. So, I started looking.

Here in Phoenix we have a place downtown called Apache Reclamation - as many of you know, this is a favorite place of mine - anyhow, one day I was there, I managed to find the near perfect power supply - It was some kind of Sun workstation switching power supply, and it had 12VDC and 5VDC outputs, several amps each, plus a couple of funky pigtails, which I reasoned were for LEDs or something, or extra 5V outputs, and a regular pigtail with standard colored wires.

Then, I thought to myself "How am I going to distribute the power?" - I needed a bus of some sort - a power bus, but how to make it. Well, ladies and gents - they make these things called bus strips - which are made of plastic, or in high power applications, ceramic - that have metal strips with screws on them to hook wires or metal strips to. So, Apache had a few of them, so I bought them, and also bought some yellow, red and black 12 gauge hookup wire.

At home, I mounted the bus strips (about four of them) to the bottom of my desk (a folding table), then I ran, from screw to screw on each of the bus strips, a yellow, a red, and a black wire. The yellow would be my 12VDC bus, red would be 5VDC, and black would be ground. Then, on one end of the bus I hooked up the power supply I had found (and before I hooked it up, checked that it worked, found the proper wires for 12VDC, 5VDC, and ground), screwed it to the bottom of the desk, and also hooked up an LED (to one of those smaller independant pigtails) to indicate power (which I then mounted into a hole I drilled into the metal strip that runs around the edge of the table).

Now, you may be screaming to yourself "But you don't have all the voltages coming out of that power supply!" - to which I say "Rubbish!"...

I have 12VDC, and 5VDC - and if I use the 5VDC as a "ground" (kinda like OC'ers do for fans), I also have a source of 7VDC!

Now, my toys that need 5 and 12VDC are taken care of. The scanner? It needed 15VDC - but I tried it with 12, and it works fine, your mileage may vary. For the KVM switcher that needed 9 volts, I tried using the 7 volt level, which almost worked, but not well enough, so I took the 12VDC line, dropped a variable resistor on in a voltage adjustment (not rheostat) config, measured with the DVM for the proper voltage (a little over 9VDC), then tried it - it worked fine. I let it run for a while, then felt it for heat - not too big a deal, ran cool. I could have also dropped the voltage to 9 volts over a few diodes as well, or if I wanted to be really cool - use a variable regulator circuit. But this particular device didn't need it.

That's it! No more wall warts, and I got back needed sockets for other things. It was cheap - total cost of parts was like $15.00, plus a little labor. Heck, use an old AT power supply, and you might have the rest in a junk box, and save a bit more money.

I know this won't help the guy who travels - but maybe he can build a mini version, using a smaller power supply (they make some quite small ones - check out www.allelectronics.com), some wire, and some custom connectors...