Like many people, I have a number of devices powered by the mains to lower voltage power supplies that have come with them. There are seven of them stuck in power boards under my desk. Most are 12v or 5v; one (for powered speakers) is an oddball 10v. It seems to me that it would be a lot tidier if one could get a single power supply with outputs for the common voltages, with leads to the individual devices. Does such a thing exist?

rpvr - 2020-12-09 09:28:00

the problem with that is the combined load of 6-7 phone chargers etc being drawn on a single power supply.
Since some of them are often 1-1.5 amps you are getting up to a 5 to 10 amp power supply requirement on the DC side, which i imagine would get quite expensive...
Alternatively they could build into the single supply unit, multiple seperate power supply units , which would add to the cost and size, and generally not be anything different to what you already have

What you could do to tidy it up for the 5 volt stuff at least, is buy the separate phone charger units with dual USB ports, and purchase the two in one cable connectors, which will give you two device connectors per USB port (seen on aliexpress), however this will most likely affect the charging times and capabilities for some phones/tablets etc

Edited by king1 at 10:07 am, Wed 9 Dec

king1 - 2020-12-09 10:06:00

Should work, except if they are audio devices, watch out for ground loops.

You could make one.

tygertung - 2020-12-09 16:15:00

There's power supplies designed for musician's pedal boards, like this (I'm not saying it's exactly the one you want):

https://www.rockshop.co.nz/shop/truetone-1-spot-pro-cs12-ped
al-power-supply-12-x-isolated-outputs-9v-12v-18v-9vac-high-c
urrent.html

gyrogearloose - 2020-12-09 16:51:00

You could build one from an old computer power supply (Google "diy bench power supply atx"). These output 12 volts and 5 volts (as well as other voltages) and supply plenty of Amps. Unfortunately many of the devices have different size plugs so there will be a bit of work, and you will still have lots of leads

duncb - 2020-12-10 09:03:00

duncb wrote:

You could build one from an old computer power supply (Google "diy bench power supply atx"). These output 12 volts and 5 volts (as well as other voltages) and supply plenty of Amps. Unfortunately many of the devices have different size plugs so there will be a bit of work, and you will still have lots of leads

Yep that could work with a bit of thought & soldering.
They just need to be aware that volts MUST be correct & Amps NEED to be on or over rated that devices requirements

mrfxit - 2020-12-10 10:43:00

A good idea but I feel like it would become bigger and bulkier than the original power adapters

king1 - 2020-12-10 14:22:00

Some useful ideas here, thanks.

rpvr - 2020-12-10 21:23:00

king1 wrote:

A good idea but I feel like it would become bigger and bulkier than the original power adapters

Agreed, and far less flexible, you couldn't move outlets to other places, all eggs in one basket and if it fails, everything fails. No redundancy, a single point of failure.

Edited by ronaldo8 at 2:21 am, Fri 11 Dec

ronaldo8 - 2020-12-11 02:20:00

ronaldo8 wrote:

Agreed, and far less flexible, you couldn't move outlets to other places, all eggs in one basket and if it fails, everything fails. No redundancy, a single point of failure.

With all the cables on a connector strip & then heading out to the devices, if a psu fails then it's a fairly simple job to swap another psu over.

I have that on a test machine because the std psu cables were too short for benchwork

mrfxit - 2020-12-11 17:51:00