Power Supply

The picture's i am about to supply are of the power supply and what it originally came with. For those that aren't aware, 3.5" hard drives require 12v and 5v to operate, and the uIEC requires 5v too. As i mentioned earlier a lack of technical documents on the original Cardco power supply, along with the suspect condition it was in forced me to look for an alternative.

A long time ago I imported a couple of SFD-1001s from the US (110v ac) into Australia (240v ac) and purchased three very nice, 90-250v ac input switch mode power supplies that provided the 5v and 12v rails the SFDs needed to operate. They fitted perfectly in the SFD case where the original transformer and rectifier boards were. I got a spare power supply should one happen to fail. Unfortunately I couldn't use it in the Cardo project because it was too large.

I had an old DVD player that I didn't use any more so I decided to use it's internal power supply. When I opened it up I saw it used a regular pc style floppy power connector, awesome.. Minutes later I measured it and once again, too large.

Once again while scrounging around in my cupboard o' junk ( i am a hoarder, luckily,heh ), I came across an old external cdrom drive which had an external power supply. Fortunately its outputs were 5v and 12v, provided via a round four pin connector. The matching sockets are readily available, so, at last, I had my power supply!

Typically, after deciding to use the old external cdrom power supply and wiring everything up I came across a faulty dvd player at work that a customer had said wouldn't read disc's. Out of curiosity I opened it up and it had an internal power supply that would have been ideal for this project, perfect size and would have been able to supply the right voltages and current, oh well, thats life!!