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Low voltage power supplies for strobes and LEDs...  Ignore the red box, that`s just there to raise these power supplies off the ground in case of floods (and it does flood in the garage following heavy rain). The naked transformer supplied power to the 24 volt Xenon beacons that topped the four light-trees on the roof above. It had an inline rectifier/smoothing cap to produce DC voltage. Powered from 240 volts AC it would give over 30 volts, but down at 110 volts it gave about 15-16, which was ideal to run the beacons at a reduced power. At 24 volts I thought they were a bit too bright to be flashing continuously for a month. Not at all ideal but it was all I could find at short notice.
The weatherproof plastic enclosure on the other hand was a little bit better made, as I had more time when I built it. That one provides 12 volt DC power for the LED-C7 bulbs. The three blue smoothing capacitors seen at the back of the output connector block (bottom) were added one by one until a decent 12 volts was reached - since this unit is not at all regulated, its output would vary with the load, and will go up with larger amounts of smoothing capacitance. I didn`t have the LED-C7 bulbs until very late on so had to build a power unit that would let me set the required amount of smoothing once they were installed and connected. It worked very well, and I`m glad I chose a weatherproof box as half way through the season I discovered the roof was leaking (again) and dripping right on top of the box! Glad it didn`t drip on the exposed transformer next to it either! |
