Wiring

February 19, 2022

I forget the model, but years ago I bought a small 12 VDC power supply that can float charge a battery at the same time. I think it's rated for a 60 W output. If the power goes out, it transfers to the battery, basically making it a UPS.

I use this with a small Mini-ITX board in a case intended for a car, which takes 12 VDC as input power. It's older, but works, and has been my web/mail/whatever server for a while. The UPS functionality is great, although it doesn't have a built-in way to signal to the server that the power has been out. For shorter outages this isn't a problem, since it can just ride through, but for longer outages I have to manually shut it down.

I haven't decided whether or not to try to come up with a way to shut the computer down automatically. I probably should, but consider this a lower priority. In the mean time, I would like to redo some of the wiring, including putting a fuse on the leads to the battery.

I had thought about trying to get all of my networking gear onto a similar low voltage UPS, including a 12 or 24 volt input ATX supply for my NAS, but for everything else I opted for a normal UPS with some larger batteries added. This has worked out fine.

Find me at @toroidalcore@hackers.town