In SX Microcontrollers, SX/B Compiler and SX-Key Tool, johncouture wrote:

All good information.  I hadn't thought about burning out a USB port.  In our district replacing the motherboard would exceed the life of the 4 year warranty (meaning we would not get a replacement board for a VERY LONG time).  Anyway, I guess the best way is to just suck it up and get the 12 1A wall warts.  Hmmm, I was looking for something more exotic (grin).

BTW, at home I use a power supply pulled from an old PC as a "bench supply".  It provides plenty of power (both 12vdc and 5vdc) and when you short it out, it shuts down and you have to unplug it to reset it.  Thus, I have learned to not short it out very often (grin).

I was going to repackage it in a nice pretty case with meters and all but got lazy and just made up a little box (Home Depot wall outlet box) with several 2.1 power jacks along with a cable that comes out and connects to the old PC power supply.  That way if the power supply get fried, I just plug my little box into the next one on the dusty shelf.  A 200W PC power supply supposedly has a rating of 20A at 5vdc so they should be able to handle a couple of chips :-)  Over the years I have accumulated several PC's and when I get tired of them collecting dust, I strip out the parts.  As such I always have a couple of power supplies lying around.

I'm almost tempted to run a 16GA wire through wiremold along the back of the benches with a fused connection for each workstation and have each bank of benches powered by one of these old desktop power supplies.  The district surely has tons of old PC's and getting 10 (some for spares) should not be a problem.  My fuse would likely be something like a buzzer that would sound if the line were  shorted.    My Dad did this with a light bulb on our old HO train set when I was a kid (50-60s) and I came to realize later in life how brilliant and simple the concept was (I shorted out the tracks many times a day and I had a feedback mechanism to indicate why the train wasn't running!).

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