• 2 Trays Mounted and Powered Up

    cyplesma • 05/24/2019 at 02:52 • 0 comments

    I spent spent quite a bit of time doing video and getting 2 boards to work on the charging tower. I have already started on 2 more. Sadly it's spring time and the honey do list for the outdoorzy stuff is growing in prior per the honey. I just need to get motivated now to finish it up with a total of 4 boards which I believe the cpu power supply should be able to handle.

  • Got My Charging Tray Power Distribution Boards

    cyplesma • 04/23/2019 at 02:50 • 0 comments

    Got my charging tray power distribution boards in. I got one soldered up and I will use that to do the cutout and endpoints to the board for the wires that need to be routed in the charging tray itself.

  • Designed a Replacement.

    cyplesma • 04/14/2019 at 17:12 • 0 comments

    Spent a couple of hours a few days ago designing a new power distribution board to use on the charging tray. This way I can solder the wires to the through holes on the board instead of recreating the mangled mess like I did on the first charging tray. JCL has the boards and en-route as of this log entry.

  • Single Tray Up and Running

    cyplesma • 04/07/2019 at 03:50 • 0 comments

    OK/Alrighty got a single tray up and running

  • Prepped ATX Power Adapter Board for Use

    cyplesma • 03/30/2019 at 16:59 • 0 comments

    Just added some pictures to show how I prepped the power adapter board.

  • Making Some Real Progress

    cyplesma • 03/24/2019 at 20:35 • 0 comments

    OK, making some real progress.  I have my first charging tray all set with the exception of actually adding the cell holders that have their TP-4056s soldered to them.  I also have the other trays cut from their stock so I can start milling, drilling and trimming that will be needed to get those set to wire up to my ATX adapter board.

    I will also in about an hour from this post get a video summary of where I am at uploaded to you tube.

    Charging Tower Update 2019 03 24

  • ATX Adapter Boards Arrived in the Mail

    cyplesma • 03/21/2019 at 02:23 • 0 comments

    The ATX Adapter boards I designed up in EasyEda and ordered through JCL showed up in the mail and seems I got the ATX 24 Pin vertical pin dimensioned correctly on the board. I do have the Gerber file in the files for this project for just the ATX connector. I did get everything soldered up except the male terminal connectors since I am still waiting for those to show up. Just hoping I got those mounting dimensions correct. 

    There are pics of the everything soldered to the board (except the male terminals as mentioned) in the files.

  • Way more Soldering Practice is needed

    cyplesma • 03/17/2019 at 19:46 • 0 comments

    Added a few more pictures, to show some progress, I am expecting my ATX power adapter soon. I'm just hoping I have the right dimensions for the PCB mountable spade terminals. After the several reworks and restarts I did today to get as far as I did I'll be needing more practice at that aspect of these projects as well.

    As you will see in the photos my solder skills have seriously depreciated in the past 20 some years, but this project should get that skill back in shape.

    What I did get done was to solder the wires that will go from the TP4056 boards to the power distribution board on the charging tray. 

  • Video Update

    cyplesma • 03/10/2019 at 21:39 • 0 comments

    Just a video update of the progress: Charging Tower Update

  • Mangling Disaster

    cyplesma • 03/09/2019 at 19:50 • 0 comments

    So my attempt to mangle an old CPU power supply did not go well. not sure what I messed up or maybe the old power supply was bad to begin with. Any I spent the past week trying my hand at setting up (drawing up in both Express PCB and EasyEDA) an adapter board to simply connect the 20/24 pin CPU power supply cable to a board and setup some fused 5VDC connections. 5 volts is all I'll need for this project.

    I started with Express PCB  liked what I had and even setup another adapter board to be able to use the other voltages on the 20/24 pin connector as well. 

    The problem I ran into was finding on either Express PCB or EasyEDA was a ready made 20 pin PCB layout. The pins are not standard and during this time I come across someone else's adapter board for electronic bench power supply that is also fused and has a switch mounted on the board. 

    Really long story short the board I made in Express PCB which I was able to print I was able to see my layout for the power supply connector was no where near right. and I had a lot of difficulty getting to be right. I bought the power supply connectors from Spark fun and I had made the board before they showed up. Needless to say I now have 5 boards ordered through EasyEDA and I hoping I designed the power connector correctly cause as I stated neither of these programs had ready made versions. I have added a screen shot of each board from both programs to the gallery.  EasyEDa was by far the better price just under 40.00 USD for 5 boards where ExpressPCB would have wanted around 150.00 USD for 3 boards. I did select 2 oz copper since it is for power and I expect a few amps to be flowing through this board.

    I wasn't able to print in EasyEDA or at least I haven't figured it out how to yet. That would be nice to have/know to check the pin footprints on nonstandard pinouts. When I get the boards in a week or 2 and they are good I will share the gerber file for the EasyEDA version. I will wait to see how I did till then to create the power supply based on this same concept for my XYZ platform project that will need 5VDC and 12VDC.