You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

[Behemot]

Missing components? Boring. Half of the board missing here http://www.hardwareinsights.com/foru...2&p=7837#p7837

[mariushm]

Re: You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

Nothing interesting here.
They probably made a batch of power supplies using that bigger case, or they bought extra stock from another factory.

Then, they bodged inside whatever crap psu they had that day recycled from some other devices.. hideous soldering, flux not cleaned from the bottom of the pcbs, they didn't bother to desolder the old wires and just soldered the new cable on the bottom of the board, there's no output filtering as far as I can see which makes me think the psu may have been some kind of "led driver" board...

[Behemot]

Re: You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

Supposed to be 5 A/12 V for LEDs. But there is Rubycon, ZLH series IIRC as the output filter. As it's been on discount, I think it was more like special edition to rip ppl off. That guy alone sold hundreds of them, other sold more…it's no small batch, they made gazillion of them.

I can imagine as most of the electronic garbage ends in China, they finally learned a way how to profit more of that than melting into ingots - reuse working components. I bet there are now garage "companies" only making such things.

[robert]

Re: You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

Looks like they re-used the whole PCB from some smaller though fairly high quality brick...
Actually the best thing they could have done, the transformer looks properly isolated and it might pass EMC, if that ground wire were connected.
Usually, you get a china-designed PCB with near no creepage/clearance and a transformer with isolation so poor it will break down within the first year. putting 230v on the output.

[Behemot]

Re: You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

Yeah I think so, I think they got bad boards maybe with bloated caps, put some other caps torn of something else in there and insterted whole board into new casing. The problem is it looks like it is ground referenced when it's just scam and the PE leads to nowhere…

[robert]

Re: You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

Actually that board looks like it was removed from some scrapped name-brand power brick, rated 2 or maybe 2,5A. Too many good quality parts (e.g ceramic fuse) on there.
The chinese just get a big container of misc. recycled 2-3A power bricks, break open their case and bodge them into their new cases.

Still, that unit will be much safer even with missing PE connection than 90% of the no-name stuff sold on ebay will ever be.
Triple insulated secondary wire plus layer isolation vs. plain magnet wire running at >150°C...
I have bought one of these crappy bricks for analysis, it would only output approx. 60% of its rated power and still run the transformer at around 160°C at 35°C ambient.
Insulation did break down instantly at <1.5kV (IEC60950 requirement for Class II is 3kV for 60s).

[kaboom]

Re: You think you've seen all the gutless power brick wonders?

Doesn't need the egc; the original unit never had one!


The junkdumpers put the three-wire IEC inlet there to make their shit unit "look better," not hard to figure out...