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Unread 15-10-2012, 12:44
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ChuckDickerson ChuckDickerson is offline
Mentor / Bayou & CMP Division LRI
FRC #0456 (Siege Robotics)
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Re: 110V AC to 12V DC suggestion

A few years ago when Circuit City was going out of business I snapped up a couple of these power supplies for real cheap:

http://www.audioauthority.com/product_details/978-100

They are 100A 12VDC power supplies and are what places like Circuit City use to run their big car stereo demo boards. Two of these units can be synced together with a simple patch cable to generate 200A of 12VDC.

We have a test station setup in our programmers cave with a CRIO, PD board, digital side car, speed controllers, spikes, motors, and a test pneumatics system, etc. We have one of these Audio Authority 100A power supplies setup to power the test board. It is way overkill but it is what I had handy and works well. We have never needed to connect 2 together for the 200A but have everything to do so if the need arises. It is much more convenient to just flip the power switch on and not need to go get a battery out of the rack (but we can use that option as well if needed).

Given that Circuit City went under, there are a bunch of these things floating around out there in the second hand market. I have seen them on Ebay and Craig’s List.