A high current power supply built around a server voltage regulator

Room for improvement

There’s always room to make improvements to a project. Here’s a couple of things that I noticed that could be improved.

• The board cutout is not large enough to allow a standard 3-pin fan plug to be threaded through it. I had to cut my fan lead and resolder it back together after plugging it in to the board.
• I forgot to add silkscreen pinout information for the UART header so you have to have the design open for reference when connecting up the UART.

Both of the above issues are fixed in the Gerber files that you can download from my site.

Video

If you’d like to see me try to make something as mundane as a power supply appear interesting in a video then you can do so by clicking below. Better resolution can be had by viewing the video on the main YouTube site.

If you’d like to have a go at building one of these yourself then I’d certainly recommend it. If you’re confident you can solder the surface-mount INA226 then everything else is a walk in the park.

Click here to go to my downloads page where you will find a link to download the Gerber files in a form that you can directly upload to a site like PCBWay, Elecrow, ITead, Seeed etc. The board is a two layer 10x10cm design.

Click here to go to the Github repository for the firmware. In the bin directory you will find a compiled .hex file for each release. If you have avrdude installed then the firmware can be flashed and the fuses set with the following commands:

$ avrdude -c usbasp -p m328p -e -U flash:w:nxa66.hex
$ avrdude -c usbasp -p m328p -e -U lfuse:w:0xe2:m -U hfuse:w:0xde:m

Replace nxa66.hex with the name of the hex file that you downloaded.

Final words

It’s nice when something works first time and I’m pleased that this project was one of those. I now need to finish it off with a nice transparent acrylic laser cut case which means spending some hours in front of Inkscape. I’ll do that and be sure to write up my experience in another article here.

If you’d like to comment on anything in this article the please feel free to use the comments section below. If you have more detailed comments or questions then please use the forum and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Original article. Some PCBs are also available from author here.

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