brianlanning wrote:
Of course, you could fake out the power supply, but I have no idea how
to do this. It may be as simple as jumpering a couple wires on the atx
motherboard connector. Or it could be a lot more complicated than
that.
It shouldn't be - just trigger the proper wire(s) and she'll fire right up.
SHOULD work, anyway.
Alternatively, you could get a pre-ATX AT style power supply. IIRC,
these just powered on with the switch on the power supply. You'd still
need to make it look like there's a motherboard there though.
Nope.... AT PSUs weren't typically that clever. The power switch was usually
attached at the front of the case via a big thick wire that actually interrupted
the incoming AC line, so you do have to be careful of that when using these things.
Another thing to remember is that the 300watt power ratings on those
things are fake. Just look at the wire gauge. In addition, the power
supply isn't designed to send all the power down one wire. It may be a
300 watt power supply, but chances are it can't supply more than a
fraction of that to any one HD connector or the motherboard. You may
not even get enough power on one HD connector. You could twist several
of them together, but this might freak out the power supply. I'm not
an electrical engineer.
Correct as well - looking at this 300W supply sitting right here, it lists 14A
capacity for the +3.3V output, 25A for +5V, 10A for +12V, 1A for +5VSB (standby
power??), and 0.5A for both -5V and -12V. I DON'T THINK that these supplies
typically "divide" a particular voltage individually to the separate wires - the
full 10A *should* be available to any device(s) on any of the +12V wires. Load
balancing is provided by Kirchoff's Law
Lastly, you could get a proper DC power supply to drive the thing. But
that would probably cost more than a boom box.
Something like this?
http://www.rpelectronics.com/English...s/PSR-1215.asp
13.8VDC@15A regulated-output switching supply, $123.