Electronics > Beginners
Zener's burning out
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james_s:

--- Quote from: bd139 on July 20, 2019, 10:34:04 am ---Some advice: building a bench power supply is much much harder than it looks. Even all the semi sexy looking designs on here and a lot of commercial units are full of stupid flaws. Overshoot, spontanous oscillation, failure prone (try charging a car battery up with that Farnell supply and then the line power fails!), all sorts. Even an LM317 can oscillate like hell if you happen to have a couple of metres of test leads hanging off it.

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This is one of the things I like about it though. A power supply is simple in concept but you can really dive deep into the details and learn a tremendous amount if you want to. It doesn't have to be complicated, when I was about 12 I built a simple fixed 12V power supply using three 7812 regulators in parallel (yeah, I know that's bad practice but it worked) and I used that thing heavily for around 15 years. A basic zener referenced voltage regulator with a pass transistor can teach you all kinds of basic concepts and in the end you get something useful, it's hard to have too many power supplies. These days I use a commercially made bench PSU but when I was starting out I couldn't afford something like that and I'm glad I was building my own because it taught me a lot.
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