Hi all, (Cross-posted to both GTALUG and KWLUG, because I belong to both. Please reply to the list you're subscribed to. Otherwise, mail admin gets mad at me.) I need a benchtop power supply (0-30V, 0-5A, though 0-10A would be nice). Question: - What brand do you recommend? - Amazon.ca recommends "Sky Toppower" brand. Anyone have experience with these? -- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
On 2019-10-30 2:07 a.m., William Park via talk wrote:
Question: - What brand do you recommend?
The Rigol DP700s are nice, but maybe a bit more pricey than you'd want at US $300. Rigol kit is often re-badged by much more expensive resellers. Personally, I have an Atten APS3005S because it's what A-1 had in stock. It works, it's a little noisy, it doesn't seem to do the dreaded 30V-on-power-up that some cheap benchtops are notorious for. It was under $200. It's accurate and stable enough for my simple needs. My only real complaint - and I suspect that this is my brain more than anything else - is that the the coarse/fine adjust dials are exactly the wrong way round for me. I've not yet fried anything, but usually grab fine when I'm looking for coarse.
- Amazon.ca recommends "Sky Toppower" brand. Anyone have experience with these?
This looks super generic. At least it's not from a "5-8 random letters, vaguely pronounceable" Amazon supplier. It's a good price if it does what you need it to do. While people often recommend secondhand kit like old HPs here, they tend to be: 1) huge and heavy; 2) if cheap, possibly old enough to require replacement power capacitors. Even a small PSU has a _lot_ of magic smoke to let out, as we found from Elmwood's security footage when the Apple IIe decide to get smokey on us; 3) if old, maybe have analogue dials which are far less fun now my eyesight is progressively downgrading. Whatever you get, you won't get enough (or the right kind) of DC cables for what you need. cheers, Stewart
Remember that a *lot* of Amazon Marketplace kit that plugs into the mains is not safety-certified (which means it's illegal to sell here and it's illegal to use; Amazon washes their hands of responsibility for anything "sold" by a third-party through their marketplace, though product actually "sold by Amazon" is certified). Some of it is absolutely fine and the vendor just hasn't spent the money for a safety certification, but I've found many, many devices that could never pass a safety cert and should never go near mains power. Obviously anyone purchasing a benchtop power supply generally has the skill to assess the safety of their own kit, but unless you take the box apart and check the internals, I wouldn't have confidence in (e.g.) the mains isolation of many of these uncertified supplies. -Chris (the marketplace vendor ads are amusing in this regard -- the ad for one of the benchtop supplies on amazon.ca assures you that it's completely safe because it has a fuse (!), and another advertises that the *detachable cord* is UL-certified :-/ CE/RoHS/FCC is also often promoted as safety certification but of course it's nothing of the sort) On Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 2:08 AM William Park via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
Hi all,
(Cross-posted to both GTALUG and KWLUG, because I belong to both. Please reply to the list you're subscribed to. Otherwise, mail admin gets mad at me.)
I need a benchtop power supply (0-30V, 0-5A, though 0-10A would be nice).
Question: - What brand do you recommend? - Amazon.ca recommends "Sky Toppower" brand. Anyone have experience with these?
-- William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca> --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
participants (3)
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Chris Tyler -
Stewart C. Russell -
William Park