Electronics and technology blog    /    Page 10

Today I have a short review on a very popular topic: fuses. Yes, we’re talking about the component that, as everyone knows, is the last thing to blow. Of course, there are plenty of nuances here, and I’ll try to explain some of them.

Many of you probably remember that I’ve had just about every converter model from Riden, or RuiDeng, pass through my hands. To this day, I’m still not sure which name is correct. After the RD6012P came out, I’d check from time to time to see what was new, but unfortunately, nothing had changed; the hybrid 6012 was still their latest model. Then, just today, I spotted a new product, and I’d like to share the announcement with you.

Some time ago, one of my subscribers sent me a power supply—or, more precisely, a charger—not for repair, but for testing and review. But what’s actually more interesting is a certain “special feature” I’ve wanted to tell you about for a long time, but hadn’t come across a sample to show. To get ahead of myself, everything turned out better than I expected :)

Another power supply has come my way, this time from an SVEN SB-550 active speaker system. The repair is fairly routine, but still interesting in its own way, and involves replacing the PWM controller with a non-original part.

This review—or article, whichever you prefer—is a continuation of my write-up on modifying a power supply to turn it into a low-voltage UPS. Last time, I covered a 150 W power supply and complained that the LRS-150 turned out not to be a very good fit for this purpose. So, let’s see how its bigger brother fares.

The other day, someone brought me a power supply to repair. Well, not exactly for repair: it had already been repaired and was working, but according to the person who brought it in, it was behaving strangely. The result was a little unexpected, and that’s what I wanted to tell you about today, since I think anyone could run into this “quirk.”

As I mentioned earlier, next up is putting the PSU-UPS adapter board to use. Along the way, I'll also review the Mean Well LRS-150 series power supply today.

Not long ago, I posted an example of modifying a Mean Well UPS using my own board. That time, I used an older version of the board, which had some drawbacks due to the simplicity of the circuit design. Today, I’ll show you the new version of the board, which addresses the shortcomings of the previous design.

Today’s article is about repairing—or perhaps restoring—two power supplies from a mini PBX. These units are quite unusual and use some rather unconventional circuit designs, so this will be a long and fairly detailed article. I hope it will be useful for beginners and interesting for experienced repair technicians as well.

I hadn’t even thought about writing up this repair. Then I figured I’d just write a little and add a few photos. But I got carried away, and it ended up becoming an article about how power supplies behave when the voltage is too high, with a little extra theory about the circuitry of the chips.

As I mentioned before, along with the BL1850 and BL1860 batteries, I also received a charger for them. At first, I hadn't even planned to review it, but I tested it while checking the batteries, took it apart, and decided it was probably worth writing about after all.

So, I’ve just finished testing the second battery I received, and this one is the BL1860, rated at 6 Ah. Inspection, teardown, tests, conclusions—as usual.

Not long ago, I was asked to test and review some batteries for Makita power tools. Since this is right up my alley, and the batteries were expected to be good, I thought, why not? In short and subjectively: they’re solid. For the long, objective version, read on.

In my previous article, I wrote that repairing power supplies is usually not cost-effective, and even gave examples of cases where it really does make sense. But I just remembered a simple power supply I worked on fairly recently that’s a good example of when a repair is worthwhile.

Some time ago, I was sent several different pieces of equipment to repair, including a couple of power supplies. The repairs themselves weren’t particularly difficult, but they covered a fairly wide range of common failures. I’d like to use them as examples to show what’s what, what’s best avoided, and what you should definitely do.

The other day, one of my readers offered me some very interesting batteries to test. It turned out he lived just a couple of tram stops away, so of course I couldn't turn him down. My wife and I went for an evening walk, met up, and now I can show you the test results.

First, I should say that I know exactly how this charger works. It’s strange in its own right, but it’s probably better to look at the photos and read the short description. The real surprise comes at the end—I’m almost certain you’ve never seen anything like it.

Some time ago, I reviewed a universal trigger that was advertised as offering convenient controls and Power Delivery support, but in practice it turned out to be pretty mediocre. This time, I bought a few simple, compact models that turned out to be surprisingly good.