Ampere was the Newton of Electricity.

I think Maxwell was probably right, certainly the unit of current Ampere gives his name to has been a concern of mine recently.

Regular readers may have possibly noticed my unhealthy obsession with single board computers. I have recently rehomed all the systems into my rack which threw up a small issue of powering them all. I had been using an ad-hoc selection of USB wall warts and adapters but this ended up needing nine mains sockets and short of purchasing a very expensive PDU for the rack would have needed a lot of space.

Additionally having nine separate convertors from mains AC to low voltage DC was consuming over 60Watts for 20W of load! The majority of these supplies were simply delivering 5V either via micro USB or DC barrel jack.

Initially I considered using a ten port powered USB hub but this seemed expensive as I was not going to use the data connections, it also had a limit of 5W per port and some of my systems could potentially use more power than that so I decided to build my own supply.

A quick look on ebay revealed that a 150W (30A at 5V) switching supply could be had from a UK vendor for £9.99 which seemed about right. An enclosure, fused and switched IEC inlet, ammeter/voltmeter with shunt and suitable cables were acquired for another £15

A little careful drilling and cutting of the enclosure made openings for the inlets, cables and display. These were then wired together with crimped and insulated spade and ring connectors. I wanted this build to be safe and reliable so care was taken to get the neatest layout I could manage with good separation between the low and high voltage cabling.

The result is a neat supply with twelve outputs which i can easily extend to eighteen if needed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that even with twelve SBC connected generating 20W load the power drawn by the supply was 25W or about 80% efficiency instead of the 33% previously achieved.

The inbuilt meter allows me to easily see the load on the supply which so far has not risen above 5A even at peak draw, despite the cubitruck and BananaPi having spinning rust hard drives attached, so there is plenty of room for my SBC addiction to grow (I already pledged for a Pine64).

Overall I am pleased with how this turned out and while there are no detailed design files for this project it should be easy to follow if you want to repeat it. One note of caution though, this project has mains wiring and while I am confident in my own capabilities dealing with potentially lethal voltages I cannot be responsible for anyone else so caveat emptor!