Skynet 8080 SMPS

[jonclancy]

Hi Everyone,

I've acquired a couple of ever popular Skynet 8080 SMPS modules and would like to give them a bit of a tweak!

The build quality is very nice - all through hole and with decent looking components. Caps C10, 13, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, etc look like they'd be an easy swap out for some of the old favourites.

I've been trying to track down the Molex connectors used here, with some results (apart from the need to use a 13 way because the 12 way aren’t listed). If you go to www.molex.com and type in 5239 for the female housing and 2478 for the female crimp terminal, then you’ll get the ones used with the connectors specified in the 8080 datasheet. You can also type in 5273 and see all of the series (it’s the middle column that is the only active product and at the bottom is a link to the mating parts). I was looking at a brass or phosphor bronze crimp with heavy gold plating (because we can!!). We will need to make sure that the crimp housings are good for around 10A, I suppose and you can see on the Molex site that there are options for different AWG wires.

Nuuk has some excellent info at: http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/nuukspot/...tml#smpsreview


The 8080 datasheet is available here:http://www.skynetusa.com/index.php?k...ge=shop.browse

http://www.skynetusa.com/images/stor...8%20series.pdf

Cheers

Jon

[dweekie]

have you compared it yet to the battery power on the t-amps?

[jonclancy]

Hi,

I haven't compared the two yet as I am still waiting for my load resistors to arrive. Should be here on Monday, and I'll be able to rig the SMPS up. I'm currently running a 7ah SLA and am pretty impressed by the results with my Trends Audio TA10.

Cheers

Jon

[justblair]

I'm watching this thread with interest...

I have four of these running my gainclone amps. I still have some newb wrapping on me, so please be gentle in your explanations.

Regards

Blair

[jonclancy]

Well, it hasn’t caught fire yet!! I've mounted one of my two SMPS in an alu enclosure. It's a modular layout and is predrilled to fit 1-4 smoothing caps. The 50W 10R load resistor barely gets warm, and the Intel PII heatsink is pretty much at room temp. I guess I over-specced the heatsinking!! I'll be comparing this with my SLA battery with a float charger.

I’ve been thinking that with up to 4 x 68 000uF smoothing caps, the bleeder resistor(s) on the skynet will be vastly underrated. I assume that when I switch off the main switch with the smoothing caps fitted, then all that juice is going to be dissipated through the SMPS bleeder? If I could identify the bleeder, then it would be possible to desolder it and attach flyleads directly from the PCB to the 2K2 50W bleeder I preinstalled. I would rather have a longer time constant for discharging the caps than the heat I had last time I was messing about with a 10w 10R across the battery!!

When I first powered the Trends TA-10 from it, I listened to M2 by Marcus Miller and it was sounding very good indeed with a decent soundstage. Might just be that it’s a good recording, though and after a few days, I’ll dump the battery back on there just to see what’s missing / different.

Jobs to do over the next few days include making up the leads for the smoothing caps, fitting the caps to a DC supply to give them a headstart on running in, and just keeping the discs spinning. I’m also wanting to fit an LED powerindicator onto the spare +12V supply pin. I also intend to get the SMPS and battery supplies onto the scope to see what the supply quality is like.

More info as it comes.........

Jon

[jonclancy]

Just for info, I was going to use these caps - originally sourced for my yet to be started Aleph X project.

Might need to add some R to my filtering. but will need to do a bit more reading there.

Cheers

Jon