One by one, the power supplies for my Rpi2 and Rpi3 computers are failing. They came with CanaKit and Vilros kits and are now pushing four years old.
I'd prefer to buy from Amazon, since it's worked well in the past, but the number of choices is bewildering and few look particulary well-matched to the Pi's needs, most being chargers and just slightly below the Pi's current requirements.
Separate supplies (avoiding common points of failure) seem desirable and I'm not reluctant to pull out a soldering iron to adapt a Pi power cable to a generic wallwart.
doesn't matter where you buy, buy high quality products - usually but not necessarily they are a bit more expensive and usually Amazon is full of cheap Chinese crap. Meanwhile even cheaper is coming from elsewhere (Vietnam) so soon the bad stuff from China will be qualified as high quality - it is a parody! I also stopped buying German goods if they are not entirely manufactured in Germany or USA goods that are not entirely manufactured in USA, cause all of them do this in China.
On a sunny day (Fri, 4 Feb 2022 02:40:30 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska snipped-for-privacy@www.zefox.net> wrote in <sti3mt$1cj$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
I have repaired many of similar power suplies (Wallwarts) by replacing the ectrolytic capacitors, You can often spot the bad ones as those usually start to swell up a bit: PCB _______| |_______| good |
_______| (_______| bad | /\
If you have an oscilloscope check the ripple voltage, beware of the mains though.
I bought new electrolytic caps and a couple of these a few weeks back:
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comes with adaptors for everything, beware: check polarity as + and - can be reversed, you may need a multimeter, It has a switch to select the output voltage
All that said, none of my raspi supplies have failed so far, most are on 24/7 or 12/7. Some are now powered via USB hubs and their supply however.
These days I'm generally using multi-port power bricks, rather than wall-warts. You don't pay a lot more and you get tens of watts, often using USB-PD or some other quick charge protocol. They have a removable power cord which makes them more convenient to have on a desk than a wallwart near the floor. Multi ports makes it easy to power all your USB widgets from one wall socket.
Random example (no experience with this brand):
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This guy is Danish, so not always relevant to US suppliers, but does a good job of reviewing them - I especially like the 'death' score for how dangerously the device is constructed.
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you read through those you can probably get a feel for which brands are good and which are lethal.
On a sunny day (04 Feb 2022 16:25:21 +0000 (GMT)) it happened Theo <theom+ snipped-for-privacy@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote in <H7i* snipped-for-privacy@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>:
A common charger likely connects all USB to the same ground (of the charger) This _may_ cause problems if sending for example audio or video from one raspi to the other. as the power / USB cables drop signifcant voltage. I have had hum and noise problems in audio.
That's a good point I didn't think about. There don't seem to be any noise problems now and avoiding shared grounds is probably a good idea. The wallwarts are all transformer isolated, best to keep it that way.
One issue for me is the plug orientation. When the prongs are in-line with the body of the wart they fit nicely on my outlet strip. Seems that most of the highter-output warts have transverse prongs, so the warts collide with each other along the outlet strip.
For the moment I might try re-flowing the solder joints I can get at on the failed unit in hopes a little more life can be wrung out of it. The caps look good and nothing is obviously cooked.
Saturday February 05 2022 11:53, you wrote to Jan Panteltje:
Wow, that has some resemblence of my lounge when we downsized to our new house where the room (and many others only have one power outlet). I put up with it for 1 - 2 years where I had two multi connectors that hold 6
7 sockets before asking a electrician to put in a stack more (4 doubles with two having USB outlets) plus many others around the house as some only had a single outlet.
At the same time as the flooring was up on the first floor got him to wire in Cat 6 Network cables between my study and my wife's one as well as the lounge but I had to redo it as despite me telling him NOT to run the wire close to power cable he did, so I re did it all properly so now have 1Gb - 10Gb transfer speeds around the house although only 210Gb cable service as the price really jumps up in costs as you increase speed but there again you cannot easily make use of the faster speeds as most uploaders are running closer to 20Mb.
The electrician looked at the cable inside one of the sockets and the other end and saw that the wiring was using nickel from the 60's (as against modern copper). Now before we purchased the property I used a socket tester on All sockets around the house and looked at the distribution panel (having opened it) and it had modern wiring i.e., using colour coded cable from the last set of standards that was only a couple of years earlier. However it turned out the people selling had replaced the cable in it up to a foot or two up into the trunking taping old and new wiring, to hide it no doubt.
7,500 pounds later the house had a total rewire plus the cost of redecorations which was a similar amount but now I have all the various electronics connected up around the TV, media computer etc but instead of using the power adaptors that power a USB cable I just plug the cable in to the USB socket on the power outlets. The two studies we use have also had a major increase in power sockets and almost at the same time replace all the lighting bulbs for Leds hopefully saving power bills for the future.
Needless to say the wiring is a lot neater other than the cables connected that are some time a bit longer, dangling on the floor but hidden behind the TV cabinet / cupboard.
Yes I must admit I would have liked to have taken legal action against the seller but they did not lie on the request for information about the house - as they specified they did not know about electrics so could blame their late father.
Teaches you to double check on a possible new house by getting a electrician it to do a solid check as against my quicky.
Good that's off my chest, sorry for the long winded post :)
On a sunny day (Fri, 4 Feb 2022 22:29:55 -0000 (UTC)) it happened bob prohaska snipped-for-privacy@www.zefox.net> wrote in <stk9d3$ijg$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
Yes, a common problem:
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and that is just my 'programming table'.
I did a 'bad hack' once with my Kodak picture display, just cut the wire open from the wall-wart to the display and added a 1000 uF elecrolytic capacitor in parallel :-) No need to open the thing, was not easy anyways. Just looked, yes its still in there (taped closed) :-)
On a sunny day (Sat, 05 Feb 2022 15:30:05 +1200) it happened snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org (Vincent Coen) wrote in snipped-for-privacy@f1.n.z2.fidonet.org>:
Yes, now all those floor warts here go to one outlet of my UPS.... Not drectly to the mains, powers everything for some minutes if mains fails. When main interruptions get longer than a few minutes I plug the UPS into this:
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is a 250 Ah lifepo4 battery pack with on top of it a 2000 W 12V to 230V pure sinewave converter. Will allow me to watch TV etc for the whole night, lights, other electronics and even can power the gas central heating if must be. Bought the thing for a boat actually, to have some power. Your power tools, drill, sander, paint stripper, washing machine, cooking plate and microwave all run happely on it :-)
I have some solar panel somewhere to charge it back up, will take some time...
That's rather impressive 8-) At least the 45 degree inclined receptacles give some chance of orienting the wallwarts so they don't _have_ to interfere. Here is the USA that's an unusual option.
One option we do have is "long arm" cube taps that turn one outlet into three. The long arm versions provide a bit of extra space between the receptacles to fit bulky wallwarts depending on shape.
My attempt at reflowing the solder joints had no effect 8-(
I'm headed in sort of the same direction. It turns out Amazon is selling "official" Raspberry Pi 4 wallwarts for about $8 each with USB C connectors. I can splice in the old micro-USB cables, leaving the USB C connectors available if/when I upgrade the Pi2s. A flying splice is not a big deal at five volts, if not very pretty. Of the first six power supplies purchased half are now dead.
That's an impressive collection of power strips. After my own power strip collection had grown too large, I upgraded. I'd love to post a photo if it were practical to take one of it, but under the computer side of my rather large corner desk are three
4-foot-long power strips, each with 16 outlets. One strip is fed from the wall outlet, and each of the other two is fed from one UPS (long story for the two UPSes). The two UPSes are fed from the first strip. About half of the spots on the three strips are used.
Just to placate the safety folks concerned I might be overloading the house branch circuit, a Kill-a-Watt device monitors the load, which is rarely over 300W unless the laser printer is running.
Yes, messing with electricity is bad, but gas is worse, and that's what I had to contend with :( Called the gas people immediately and shut off the supply - fortunately it was late summer. They came along, fitted a new meter, and left only the small kitchen boiler connected.
I do have a 4Kw solar system but that is hardly bullet proof as winter generation is very poor i.e., 1Kw at best and sometimes 1Kw for the whole day, the summer at mid day it is some where around 3KW per hour and needles to say does not get used much - may be for the odd washing machine or tumble dryer load. Night time well that is always the power grid.
A solution would be a battery pack such as in a Electric car but my cars are combustion for mine and hybrid for my wife (a new Honda Jazz) so can't do that and buying a large battery pack say 50Kw is silly money (4k pounds) with only five year warranty too much to justify.
If I was 10 years younger I would have considered one or the other - well may be not a electric car as my mileage is around 2,000 miles per year so hardly justifiable for such an expensive vehicle.
Now wind power might work but they are very noisy :(
On a sunny day (Sun, 6 Feb 2022 09:06:31 +0000) it happened Folderol snipped-for-privacy@musically.me.uk> wrote in <20220206090631.7bde5f6d@devuan>:
Yes same here, guy fitted a 'smart' gas meter, thing made banging noises. called the emergeny gas phone line, other guy came and replaced the gas meter, he said "You won't believe what I have seen".
If the devices being powered use capacitor inputs there's a good chance the peak current is greater than the figure reported by the kill-a-watt. A touch test will likely reveal any gross anomalies. Unless connectors are heating up it's unlikely to be a problem, with only 300 watts average you've got quite a bit of headroom.
Power generated by system is at 3 Kw (3 kilo watts = around 13 Amps) - enough for general power consumption such as dish washer or washing machine or tumble dryer but not enough even for a 3Kw kettle let alone for the oven or more than one ring of the hob.
Pre installation I estimated it would be at least 10 years before it would pay for itself and then onwards start to create real savings but I have a feeling that 13 - 15 years is closer to the mark unless the FIT ( Feedback Tariff ) increases a lot from around 0.05 for 50% generated and I feed more than that back to the grid as day (light) general consumption is below 1 Kw.
If I still lived in my bungalow with half acre of land I could put a wind unit at the back of it so as to not be bothered by any noise but one for the home would only be between 1.5 - 3 Kw and that would 'assume' that it was windy enough to generate at full bore - one heck of an assumption with my basic estimate of cost for it of say 3K pounds and I bet it would be higher.
These systems are great you you are young enough to maximise the benefits but around 70 when installed (5 years ago) is unlikely and that also assumes that you will not move house.
If I had got solar power say 10 years earlier the FIT would have been a lot higher but there again the cost of installation would have been more than double. So you cannot really win on this unless you own a electric car with over 70Kw batteries and only use it lightly, another big assumption :)
What's that old saying - there no such thing as a free lunch!
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