Topic: Voltage?

Whats the mains voltage that chumby takes? Does it have a transformer on the plug, or a built in power supply? and is it a switching mode powersupply?

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Re: Voltage?

The wallwart on the chumby provides a nominal 12V @ 1A. The measured peak current is around 300 mA to the chumby, but it depends heavily upon loading conditions (for example, you can probably do icky things to the 2W speakers to cause it to draw even more current), hence the margin on the wall wart.

The wallwart is a switching supply. Chumby also has point of load converters that are switchers as well that create 5V, 3.3V, and 1.65V from the input voltage.

7BAA 2E53 01C1 DCFF 497B  E7F0 9699 A303 78F0 D9B9

Re: Voltage?

oh right. thats good then. are you gonna have switchable plugs (like on the ipod charger), or just supply more than one wall wart?

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Re: Voltage?

Just out of interest, what is the voltage tolerance of the regulator in the Chumby?

Would I be able to throw 13.8VDC at it and have it not die? What about a 5VDC rail? I know a lot of embedded computers have pretty damn impressive voltage tolerance, but then, most embedded computers aren't trying to drive an LCD screen.

Re: Voltage?

For internationalized chumbys, we will probably supply a wallwart with a different plug to match the local plug standard. It's a very low cost device so the price of a switchable plug power adapter might be too much for us.

Our voltage tolerance is 6V to 14V. You might be able to press 14V a tad--so for use in a car application it might be a good idea to throw a transient absorber in-line to supress the nasty big spikes that tend to exist on the car DC mains. However, the chumby should fundamentally work with clean lead-acid battery voltages as well as a variety of Li-Ion and NiCad/NiMh battery packs.

7BAA 2E53 01C1 DCFF 497B  E7F0 9699 A303 78F0 D9B9