Well, today I hacked my first ATX PSU. Wasn’t much to it really, just followed the directions over at http://web2.murraystate.edu/andy.batts/ps/powersupply.htm and it went pretty straight forward. I took a few liberties with the general design (blame Radio Shack, they were out of Binding Posts) - actually like the way I did it better anyways. The plan is to use this one to power the talking skull (5v) and the DC motors (12v) which control both the neck of the armature and the stirring action of the witch.
Here’s a quick peak at my handy work.
I covered the vent where I zip tied the sandbar resister with a strip of electronical tape. The reason being is that I didn’t want to expose the heat sink lube as it oozed out - that stuff is like super toxic and I don’t me or anyone who happens to handle this baby the unknowingly touch the stuff.
An astute observer (at least one who’s done this before) will notice I’m missing the blue -12v wire. That’s because the dag nabbit thing came loose from the circuit board when I was organizing wires. I didn’t bother soldering it back because I was feeling a bit a lazy not wanting to remove the circuit board from the chassis to get to the bottom. And because I figured well, the motors only run off +12v anyways so I currently don’t need it.
I have it powering a miniature string of Christmas LEDs that typically ran off 4 AA batteries as a load test. We’ll see how she does.
-TM