I have an unused laptop adapter, listed as 19.5V, 9.23A. Could I use this to power the miniRambo, or is it too much?
Also, I cut the barrel connector and have a green (ground) wire, could I just cut this back, connecting only the black/white wires?
Thanks
As long as the voltage is within the board specs then yes, you can use it.
Having the Amps higher than whatever the bord needs is always a good thing, means that the power supply will not heat nd will last longer.
What you want to avoid is the opposite: not enough amps, in which case the power supply can burn.
Power supplies do not push power towards whatever they are connected to, they try their best to give whatever current the thing requires, not the other way around.
No idea what this green wire does, so I can’t say if you can cut it or not. Might be some kind of communication thing between the PSU and the computer it’s supposed to power.
Dui, ni shuo de dui - Many thanks for the reply!
From the Wiki page on the mini rambo I found;
I take this as 19.5V as within range. You have a good assumption of green wire as some sort of communication thing.
Yep. Should be fine.
I would confirm the black and white are what you expect with a multimeter before connecting it.
+1 to confirming the wires. There were 2 wires and braided shielding on the laptop power supply I repurposed. Braid was -, white was + and blue carried no current - might have been a temp sensor or something.
Wouldn’t there be a ground carried all the way to the unit? I’d assume the green which is commonly used for ground colors is what it is for but I’ve not taken tons of these things apart to say for sure.
That’s why I’m agreeing that you should meter them all out. I was expecting the shield to be connected to the Ground pin off the power cord but it wasn’t but it wasn’t.
Jeffeb3, Tom,
Thanks for the input, I did measure as suggested and got the polarity assumed. I also checked the green wire. It read18.6. It is beyond my scope to know what that means.
After doing some more digging online it seems it could be a data connection used to signal what type of charger is being used in an attempt to detect “valid” Dell chargers.
I have had a bunch of dell chargers and when I plug in the old ones, it complains that they aren’t big enough. So it must know something about them from the plug. Maybe it is just a resistor or maybe it is some two way comms.
