Dumb question about power supplys

You need to purchase a suitable supply , talk to a local installer or take the camera requirements to jaycar or similar and they will have a suitable supply in stock .

Thanks, I have a suitable power supply however if I could do without it by adapting one of the computers power leads then so much the better.

How far is the camera from your PC? I cant see any problem with doing this. The PC PSU is probably more stable than most plug packs you can buy.

Yes, there is a configurable power supply that sites on a blanking plate and takes powere fromthe PC supply and provides it at a socket on the blanking plate that will do exactly what you want.

i think I purchased mine from Jaycar.

The PC power supply can handle that easily, it should provide 12v at several amps.

No risk of a big bang unless you connect the camera the wrong way around. Yellow's +12v I'm pretty sure, but double check on Google.

I've rigged up a cable that connects to one of the spare connectors on the power supply and runs to

Cheers,

On Thu, 11 May 2006 18:16:13 +1000, shorebreak put finger to keyboard and composed:

I think you're pretty safe. However, as a general rule, whenever I replace an isolated plugpack supply with a non-isolated PSU, I test for continuity between supply negative and signal ground. Some devices (eg DMM) may misbehave if you connect the signal and power grounds.

- Franc Zabkar

amps.

That is actually something to be wary of. I did something like this once. The camera had a tantalum capacitor across the supply that decided to go short-circuit. I don't know why - from memory, the capacitory was a 16V one, so I'm pretty sure the voltage was not exceeded. Anyway, the resulting high current through the capacitor made quite a mess of the camera - I was lucky it didn't catch fire.

So, you may want to include a fuse.

Andy Wood snipped-for-privacy@trap.ozemail.com.au

Yes, I have one of these and that was my intention also. Just not sure which wires to connect to the molex connector.

Thanks, do you remeber which wires you used? Yellow and black?

amps.

The fuse is an excellent idea, thank you.

amps.

That's good advise, thanks.

I will make some cables with inline fuse holders so I can protect each device individually.

Cheers, Sam

Yeah, yellow's +12v and black is ground.

Cheers,

maybe.

set your system up in the normal way, with the external powersupply and the connection to the PC in place and

and measure the voltage between the negative terminal of the power supply and the ground of the powersupply (black wire in the drive power connector) if you get 0 volts, switch the meter to ohms and measure the resistance (it should be near 0)

if both of those tests succeed it's safe to power the camera from the PC's power supply. 150mA is not likely to overload the PCs PSU.