Power and Heat Sinks

While waiting for UPS I did some work on getting the ATX power supply going and getting some heat sinks on the board.

I changed out the socket for the power adapter as I have seen them fail time an again and with giving it 34 amps on that little connector there was no way I was going to trust it, at that current you get a small arc, turns into a big arc and melts the connector down, so as you can see in the upper left corner I swapped it out for an XT60 socket that I use in my model airplanes and quads that is rated at 60 amps, and it gives me the added benefit that I can pop in my watt meter that I use for the same as the connectors and it is rated for 100 amps so I can get an exact idea of how much current the printer is going to take, and if I can add a second hotend later without a second power supply etc.

Instead of just soldering it on I took some really large solid copper wire and soldered it through the holes for the jack and soldered them on both sides (double sided board) and then slid the XT60 end over it which was a perfect fit, and then soldered them to the pins and the board, I adjusted the pins so the jack would sit on the board and so it is doubly connected, and will not be ripping traces off of the board if I disconnect it, then for some extra insurance I hot glued it around the base to the board so it is rock solid now.

I glued some tiny heat sinks onto the stepper drivers (small red squares) they are 0.25" x 0.25" so like I said... tiny, and I managed to put one on sideways which really wont matter except that I am anal about detail.

Then I added heat sinks to everything else, I added them to the mosfets, the power regulator and even the PWM output. I did have to modify they bottom mosfets heatsink as it has a large capacitor really, really close to it and there just wasn't room as it was so I trimmed some off of the sides of the bottom of the heat sink to get it to fit.

With a fan that board should run nice and cool now.

Here is the power supply, connected, I didn't do anything special as some people get rid of the extra wire, I have plenty of space so I just left them, I just cut the end off of the twelve volt wires and cut the wire off of the connector that will let me soft power on and off the power supply instead of using the switch on the power supply.

I want to use the soft on/off because when I use it the board just turns off, when I flip the switch on the power supply the board goes off then flickers on and off several times as things discharge, I don't want to risk blowing anything out so going to use it like your computer does.
The power supply is just a normal ATX computer power supply, I just bought a beefy one so I had plenty of current available.

Stay tuned for building the CoreXY mechanism later.