[NSRCA-discussion] Power Supplies

[Ronald Van Putte]

A lot of electric-power pilots are building or buying charge boxes.  Many of the charge boxes contain the HP DL380 G4 DPS-600PB 12V/575W power supply.  

Since they are so inexpensive to acquire and so simple to convert for our use, I'd like to provide some information about them.

These are so called "hot swap" power supplies.  They are really tough and were designed to be used in a computer server 24/7.  Their output is 47 amperes at about 12.5 volts.  You can use two in series to provide 47 amperes at about 25 volts.

You can buy them at places like eBay for about $15 delivered if you shop around, particularly if you look for lots of two or three.  These power supplies cost upwards of $300 when they were in active use, but the servers they were designed to work with have been retired, leaving a lot of these server power supplies as surplus.  Consequently, you can get them pretty cheap. 

I usually show pilots with any measure of soldering skills how to convert them for our use.  The conversion takes about 30 minutes.  The rest, who can't solder or can't follow simple directions, I do the conversion for them.

There is a great description how to do the conversion of the HP model DPS-600PB power supply here:  https://sites.google.com/site/tjinguytech/my-projects/HP47A

Any questions?  E-Mail me offline.

See you at the Nats.

Ron Van Putte
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