Transcript:
Look at that! Thank You, Adrian there. We go, okay. Let’s talk about some basics today a little while back. I did a video on how you can Combine 1224 and 5 volt components in the same setup and on that video. A bunch of you asked in the comments, why ATX computer power supplies aren’t really used anymore in 3d printer builds, so lets. Try and find out what had these falling out of favor and check out some of the things you can do with an ATX supply. That would be really tricky with these simpler industrial types, all right, ATX supplies versus these industrial type power supplies. There are a few pros and cons to each one, and it’s not like one is always clearly better than the other, so let’s start out with the obvious differences first off. ATX supplies have a standardized shape that is kind of bulky in every direction. The more power you get from these two, the longer they get. But the front element is always the same size, but the industrial supplies are slimmer, but also a bit longer that off makes it easier for them to tuck him underneath, for example, a heated bed like down here, but the ATX form factor can work really well on some printer builds too, for example on the Mendel 99,000 This entire rear pillar is the perfect size for it. So just you know? Typically, this type of form factor can be used a bit more flexibly. There are also other PC power supply form factors that are made to plug into the same type of motherboard and components, for example, the EFX size. I have here or Pacific’s, which is just a shrunken down version of the ATX size, but those are typically a bit more expensive. Though now the other difference you can see right away. Is that the? ATX supplies have a set of wires that they come with. Some of the better units are modular, so you can just plug in the wiring looms that he actually need, but typically all of these are permanently had to the supply on more powerful supplies. The wiring itself can take up as much space as the unit itself. Because you know you get enough connectors for like, 20 hard drives for graphics cards, 2 main boards and 12 floppy drives. I always find it a bit heartbreaking to cut off the connectors from a perfectly good power supply, but the plugs on here really are only used in computer parts. Also, just one wire by itself cannot handle the entire output power. So if you need more than 100 or 200 watts, you’ll have to splice together wires from different plugs, and that can get really messy, really easily more on that in a second as there’s more to it. But one upset of having standard connectors is on the input side where you’ve got these standard. IC receptacle. So at least on the mains high voltage side. You have a really easy, clean and safe way to plug in the industrial supplies. Just come with a bunch of screw clamps up here that you can tighten on to crimp connectors or bare wire put onto tin wire, but that is both for the AC high voltage mains input as well as the DC. Output, So you have to hook up main straight yourself to on the upside, though each of these clamps on the output can carry the entire output current, basically with a single wire as long as the wire itself can handle it. Okay, so to expand on why? I need to splice together wires on the ATX supply, the industrial supplies and also some simpler. ATX students have just what’s called a single rail. Basically, one single output for 12 volt. These screw cams are all tied together. But more commonly on ATX supplies, there are two three or four 12-volt rails, which are basically several independent supplies. One rail might supply the power for the main board and the CPU another rail might be for one set of PCIe connectors for the graphics cards and were for the first graphics card and then another rail for you know, if you have a second set of PCIe connectors now, it’s not entirely perfect, just tying these separate supplies together are these separate rails, but it’s going to work to supply more current, if you, for example, are power wearing a large 12-volt heated bed but to make use of the full output power, you will need to know which connector is tied to which rail and grab power from each of them or just tie all the 12 volt lines together and another thing that comes along with these supplies being built for computers is that they don’t just generate 12 Volt. They also generate 5 Volt 3 Point 3 Negative 5 Volt, This one apparently doesn’t and negative 12 volt. Those last two ones are often used for audio now on cheaper supplies. You’ll often find what’s called Group regulation in very simplified terms. Those power supplies will regulate 12 5 & 3.3 volts together so that the voltages are just fixed ratios to one another that simply saves cause. Because you only need one big transformer that has multiple secondary windings, but as you start drawing current from 12 volt, the voltage arm, 12 Volt will slightly drop because we start having resistive losses inside the supply, so the spy itself will start trying to compensate for those losses by slightly increasing the voltage it’s trying to achieve so that the actual output voltage on the plug will more or less stay constant, no matter if you draw one amp or 20 amps. But with that group regulation, not only will the power supply compensate for the voltage drop on 12 volts at the same time, it will also increase the output voltage on 5 volt and on 3.3 Volt, Even though we aren’t drawing any current here, The safety mechanisms in the supply are still monitoring those two voltages, though, and if they go above the safe limit, it’s going to shut itself off completely, and that’s not uncommon to happen. If you have a cheap supply, this one isn’t a super cheap one and are drawing a good amount of load just from 12 volt, so one way to fix that, and that’s been done. A lot actually is to just add a load to 5 volts, for example, and one of the hard drive connectors and maybe 2 3.3 volt. All that needs to be is a resistor that wastes a few watts of power. I mean, I don’t think that’s very elegant, and I’ve not had to do it on any of my supplies yet, but then again, I don’t usually buy the cheapest ATX supplies because I will probably use them in a piece at some point next up efficiency. If you’ve got cheap, subsidized coal power than you probably don’t care about a few extra Watts here and there, but when you’re paying 25 or 30 cents per kilowatt hour, you probably do cheap. Industrial supplies will often claim 85 to 90 percent efficient, which is hard to believe to say the least. Typically these only manage about 70 percent. And I virtually so if you have a printer that needs about a hundred watts to run, it will actually draw an extra 43 watts from the wall just for losses inside the power supply. Brand-name industrial supplies are a lot better here like the ones from. Delta mean will etc. But for a tech supplies, you have the 80 plus certifications, which come in standard bronze, silver, gold, platinum and titanium. The higher you go up in level. The more efficient, the supply will be across its entire load range between twenty and a hundred percent load. If a cheap supply only tells you one efficiency figure, that’s only for peak efficiency at one specific output load and it will be much less efficient, everywhere else, also to achieve that better efficiency. 80 plus supplies usually also use better components. Another up set of ATX supplies is the fact that you can switch them off and not just with that switch on the back. Which, of course, is super convenient to, but by signaling to that green wire on here, so you’ll no doubt have seen a wire shoved into the ATX Connector like this, or you know, one of these jumper connectors that turns on the supply and there are two incredibly cool things about this first. We can control that signal with any 3d printed mainboard. Marlin has support for switching on and off and they take supply built right in. Its right there in the config. So with one GQO command, you can enable all the high power parts on your printer that are connected to that 12 volt or five volt line from an ATX supply and with another, you can turn them off again and you can even use that as an emergency stop, for example, through Octave prints, but you can also use those G codes in the start and NG codes so that before and after print, the printer turns itself on and off automatically that saves some standby power and reduces the risk of anything dramatic going wrong when the printer is just sitting idle. But the cool thing with that, is that an. ATX supply always provides five volt power for your electronics, even when you’ve switched it off electronically through that green wire, the five volt standby line right back here provides enough current for at least your printer control board and in many cases, also enough for a Raspberry Pi so that you don’t need a separate power supply for that. This one’s, also supplying two and a half amps on the five volt standby line, which should be enough for a Raspberry. Pi, maybe not a PI 4 But still, five Volt Standby is intended for keeping some functions enabled in a computer when it’s off like waiting for a wake-on-lan and more recently also to allow charging through the USB ports. Check your power supply for the exact current rating, so so ATX supplies actually sound pretty cool so far, right, well, there are two more things that are fairly strong arguments against using them. The first one is voltages. Now printers have been moving to 24 volts. This is actually a 12 volt supply, but Pre-shot 24 Volt because that makes it a lot easier to handle powerful beds as you’re reducing the current that’s needed to get the same output power, but it also gives Stepper drivers more. Headroom to breathe and actually improves the performance for high movement, speeds and fast accelerations in many cases, But of course, ATX supplies are only available with their main output voltage at 12 volt. While you can get these industrial ones in five 12 24 36 or 48 volts. Now you or a printer manufacturer can work around that by, for example, carefully, selecting these Stepper motors and drivers to work well at 12 volts. That’s totally doable and move to mains powered heated bed, for example, But then, of course, once you do that, you don’t even need a power supply as capable as an ATX unit or industrial one anymore you can get away with one of these smaller, cheap brick type supplies. This is a 5 amp unit runs our printer, Just fine and the other factor, of course, is price these industrial units. These ones have become incredibly cheap, spurred by an LED strip craze a few years ago and 3d printers coming up around the same time. So I is that a quick search for how much these are right now shipped from Germany. Taxes included and a 12 volt 20 AMP supply is 14 euros. A 30 AMP supply is 16 euros and a 24 Volt 10 AMP unit same rating as the one in the mark 3 is also 16 euros. That is just incredibly hard to beat Now. Of course, that’s the bargain bin Quality units. So if you go for one of those, you should always buy one that’s rated for at least 30% more than you think you’ll need. And also these will age over time and lose some of their and pasady as the capacitors dry out, but the same exact thing also applies to super cheap. ATX supplies now with those. You have to factor in that, you know? Connectors are actually surprisingly expensive, even if you buy them in bulk, which is why modular supplies are so much more expensive than regular ones, typically like 10 or 15 bucks. Even so, you can get a 500 watt unit rate for 26 amps so more like 300 watts of which you should maybe use like 220 for 16 euros plus shipping this time, you can get a 600 watt unit with 220 embryos for around 22 euros, and then as we get into the actually decent Brand-name 80 plus certified units, they start around 30 to 35 euros for between 24 or 30 amps of output on 12 VOLT plus shipping, Of course. Now, honestly, that’s still not super expensive, but at that point, you can also get an industrial meanwhile, power supply at 12 volt and 20 AMP or 24 volt, NM. For about 40 bucks. Honestly, if you’re building a printer, you’re okay with the 12 volt system, want a decent supply and maybe are thinking about using that That’s super cool 5 volt standby line, which I think is a really neat feature, then an. ATX supply is still a really good choice, but when it comes to printer manufacturers, not only are they probably getting even better deals on industrial supplies in bulk, but for them, a smaller packaging size is also worth a lot as it saves in logistics and dealing with ATX connectors also adds cost and complexity because they’ll need to have some solution to plug all the relevant cables in which, of course means making another custom PCB or another wire harness and spending money on the matching connectors again and spending some more time doing assembly for them. I just think it makes a lot more sense to use the industrial supplies. So if you’ve built a printer or customized one, let me know what you’ve used is the option for a 24 volt, the deciding factor. Maybe you are also using an. ATX supply with a boost converter Just for the stepper drivers totally makes sense, and before we go a big shout out to my patrons and Youtube members who make this entire thing Possible channels. Go to the patrons in the shout out here. I’ll enable member tiers here in Youtube at some point too, but for this one, thank you to Crystal. Add a Dorian Gray fill Extruder, Haitham Bonanni, James C. Foley, Jeffrey Nicholas, Jimmy Lee, Yonatan, Marlon. Marcus harms Matthew Oswalt. Mike Mcgee, Holly virus, Paul Arden printed solid Robert Hornburg, Bruno Fong Slummin and Vilem Devine. And, of course, everyone else who’s supporting on Patreon Youtube memberships. Or it’s some other way. Without you, all, this would literally not be possible. Also huge shout out to everyone who’s liking sharing subscribing that does make a massive difference too, and as always. I hope you learned something and I will see you all in the next one.