I have a question for you. How can you power up a bunch of mini spotlights cheaply? can you use one of those power boxes from a computer and just hook the light into the wireharness? I am not wanting to control anything in my haunt I just want to reduce all those 5-12 volt power supplys from getting compacted into a power strip. I would like to have one power source for all of it.
I'm pretty fond of using PC power supplies. I work in I.T. so I very often get them for free - if you work somewhere that uses computers ask your I.T. guy, chances are he'll have a few just laying around. If not, you can get them for just a few dollars on line.
A PC power supply will have to be modified a little to work without the computer, but it's really easy. My post http://haunttheyard.blogspot.com/2009/08/haunt-juice.html has a pretty easy explanation of how to do it. Basically the yellow wires are +12v, the red wires are +5v, the orange wires are +3.3v, and the black wires are ground. There's a green wire in the big connector that gets connected to one of the black wires (any of them, they're all the same) to turn on the power supply.
So to make sure I got it right I can connect the ends to the yellow, red, and orange. Then I take the green and connect it to a black. Now I have another dumb question. The mini spot lights that I am plugging in has two ends. One is negative and one is positive. where does the negative go? do they go to the black wires? I looked at your post and I tried to understand it. I am not an IT person but have wired some stuff up in my car and I did make a spot light last night with two 10mm leds and not one like you did. Last year I blew the breaker in my home with all that I had plugged up and want to avoid that this year if you know what I mean lol!
Sorry AU, for some reason I didn't get any notification that you'd responded to this post (I should have gotten an email...) Anyway, you'd connect the ground lead of the spot light to any of the black wires from the power supply - they are all connected to each other in the supply.
I have a question for you. How can you power up a bunch of mini spotlights cheaply? can you use one of those power boxes from a computer and just hook the light into the wireharness? I am not wanting to control anything in my haunt I just want to reduce all those 5-12 volt power supplys from getting compacted into a power strip. I would like to have one power source for all of it.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty fond of using PC power supplies. I work in I.T. so I very often get them for free - if you work somewhere that uses computers ask your I.T. guy, chances are he'll have a few just laying around. If not, you can get them for just a few dollars on line.
ReplyDeleteA PC power supply will have to be modified a little to work without the computer, but it's really easy. My post http://haunttheyard.blogspot.com/2009/08/haunt-juice.html has a pretty easy explanation of how to do it. Basically the yellow wires are +12v, the red wires are +5v, the orange wires are +3.3v, and the black wires are ground. There's a green wire in the big connector that gets connected to one of the black wires (any of them, they're all the same) to turn on the power supply.
Hope that helps.
So to make sure I got it right I can connect the ends to the yellow, red, and orange. Then I take the green and connect it to a black. Now I have another dumb question. The mini spot lights that I am plugging in has two ends. One is negative and one is positive. where does the negative go? do they go to the black wires? I looked at your post and I tried to understand it. I am not an IT person but have wired some stuff up in my car and I did make a spot light last night with two 10mm leds and not one like you did. Last year I blew the breaker in my home with all that I had plugged up and want to avoid that this year if you know what I mean lol!
ReplyDeleteSorry AU, for some reason I didn't get any notification that you'd responded to this post (I should have gotten an email...)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, you'd connect the ground lead of the spot light to any of the black wires from the power supply - they are all connected to each other in the supply.