Basic Tube Power Supply :)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- I made a ~600V power supply. It glows. What more could you want?
I used a 6ax5gt rectifier tube and a VR150 gas discharge tube.
Like, comment, and subscribe if you think glowing things are cool.
take a shot for every time maclean says 'glow'
"Most importantly though, it glows".
Good to see you have your priorities in order :)
How would temperatures compare to a normal PSU?
Glurgi thanks for the comment!
The temperatures are hard to compare, since the diode tube needs to be made hot in order to work. Still okay to touch, but definitely warm. I’d guess the tubes with glowing filaments get around 50°C. Roughly the same as a power supply under load, but with far less load-dependency.
Obviously super inefficient that you have to heat the dang things to make ‘em conduct, but they work, and they’re super pretty!
50-60 C doesn't seem too bad.
Normal PSU's go warmer and then need a (sometimes noisy) fan to regulate the heat. Plus they don't glow so less cool that way :)
I was thinking of a computer PSU with tubes in the 600 W range, your video inspired me.
Do you think that would be feasible?
Glurgi So, I’ve never run any significant amount of current through these tubes, but I would be surprised if that creates significant issue just based on the robust nature of constructing things out of big hunks of metal in glass tubes, rather than small semiconductor material. Biggest issue I could foresee would be that the vacuum tubes don’t physically allow that many electrons to travel at the rate/density required to pass the 1-2amps needed through the tube (maybe it’d have to be a really big tube or something).
I could see this working, but you’d basically want to use the tubes only for full/half-wave rectification step, and feed that into a particularly high-voltage tolerant flyback regulator, since tubes necessarily need to be used at much higher voltages than the 3.3, 5, 12V rails that I expect your standard PC PSU would output (plus, higher voltage means lower current and Ive never looked into the current limits of these types of dual-diode tubes).
Easiest, safest way would be to do some reverse-engineering on an existing PC PSU, figure out the specs of its main flyback(s), and then just chop out the bridge rectifier for a transformer and a tube-based rectifier. You want all the filtering, fusing, control of the PSU, but if you’re trying to add the glow of tubes, that’d be the way. Unfortunately, if you want the purple gas discharge tube you see in my video, I can’t really think of a way to make it do anything meaningful, just burning power and making it glow, since it’s up at around 100V or so if I’m remembering properly.
Also, please please please be very careful if you’re actually planning to go through with this. Playing with primary-side mains electricity is dangerous! I’m only confident enough to use the janky setup you see above because I know what I’m doing, and I know how much it hurts to be zapped, so I’m really careful. It’s really easy to accidentally stop your heart when you’re doing HV stuff like this (especially primary side).
Anyways, if nothing else, it was super fun thought experiment to see how one could incorporate vacuum tubes in a steampunky PC PSU! Maybe I should look into making a programmable power supply with a vacuum tube rectifier stage...
Hydrogen gas at voltage stabilizator
wooooord
+Milan Kozomora yeyeye
Hey! Where did you get the tubes, particularly the gas discharge? Also, do younhave a schematic I could trouble you for? I recently found three gas thyratrons and hope to make them into an amplifier power supply.
Stop jerking the camera around. Pan more slowly. And equalize the sound. Most videos are good at less than 20 on my TV. At 60 you were still mumbling. Less I don't know. Find out. Present facts. Overall grade: F. Cool doesn't matter in the technical world.