DIY Bench Power Supply

[jefflongo]

It's probably a pretty simply procedure but anyone have experience with a building a DIY bench power supply? With either adjustable voltages or at least 12v, 5v, 3.3v. Any parts to recommend or possibly even reusing things like the GC daughterboard? Would be a fun/easy useful project for me I think.

 

[Spencer Richardson]

It's probably a pretty simply procedure but anyone have experience with a building a DIY bench power supply? With either adjustable voltages or at least 12v, 5v, 3.3v. Any parts to recommend or possibly even reusing things like the GC daughterboard? Would be a fun/easy useful project for me I think.

Old pc power supplies are great if you want the set voltages that you mentioned. If you want variable, LTC3780 modules are good. I'm sure there are other good alternatives though. If you check out YouTube, there are some good ideas on what parts to get.

 

[JoJo]

I've also been interested in putting together my own benchtop power supply as I've never had one. Let us know how it turns out Jefflongo.

 

[Pinotte]

An interesting option is making a configurable class B QuickCharge 3.0 power supply. With a microcontroller you could configure your output voltage on the fly from 3.6 to 20V with 200mV steps using usb. Get a two-port quickcharge 3.0 usb wall adapter (one port for the power output and one for powering the mcu), stick it all in an enclosure with an lcd and a rotary encoder and you have yourself a low cost configurable PSU. One drawback of that method is that it could only supply 18W. Qualcomm's specs for current draw are 3.6V-6.5V at 3A, 6.5V-9V at 2A 9V-12V at 1.5A. There's a nice Arduino library for output voltage control:
https://github.com/vdeconinck/QC3Control