I hope this whole post doesn’t come across as too harsh, but it’s important to point out a few reasons that you should absolutely not try this:
- The TPS80W needs a DC PSU:
- The connector you’ve linked will simply pass through the AC wires from your 110-240V power supply. It’s the kind of work that legally requires a licensed electrician, or illegally requires some serious foolhardiness:
- To turn that AC into DC, the cheapest and safest option by far would be… a power brick. There are many other options that I wouldn’t try tackling without more electronics knowledge than I have, since you’d essentially be engineering a new PSU.
My first PSU had some home surgery from a prior owner to allow an AC cord to run into the case directly, to avoid a brick being involved. It blew up and tripped my apartment’s power, and in retrospect I’m lucky that neither my modules nor my life were affected. AC power is no joke. The people giving stern warnings about it are doing so for your safety. I didn’t understand that until after it was important!
The inability of a power brick to switch off doesn’t matter too much if the thing it is plugged into is not drawing any power. A live 18V tip might give you a zap, a live 240V wire might kill you.
I switch off power bricks that are plugged in when the equipment isn’t powered by using a power board with individually switched sockets. An inline switch would do the same thing electrically - I haven’t used or tested that product and have no affiliation with that store, but that’s what I would start researching if that was a concern.
I wouldn’t say that external bricks are on the way out, they are used in many products for aforementioned reasons.
Just quickly to touch on the internal PSU point: PSUs get hot because they don’t convert with 100% efficiency and some of the energy is lost as heat. Travel cases - presuming this is an Intellijel case, but the same principles apply to others - already compromise on heat due to small size and a lack of ventilation. Heat will cause issues, and heat buildup around the PSU brick itself will affect its performance. From the datasheet of the brick Intellijel recommend for the TPS80W:
Or: if the temperature around the unit exceeds 40°C (104°F), its performance will decrease, reaching a level of 80% at 50°C (122°F), and lower beyond that. Also note the temperature reports on the last page here: the unit itself goes up to >55°C when running at 100% load for an hour, while in a 20°C room. The inside of your case is unlikely to be under 20°C!
Anyhow, once again, I hope this didn’t come across as too harsh, but if I were in your shoes I’d either adapt the power entry to 1U or drill holes in the case for the bits. Intellijel might have a mounting template, if you email them.
(P.S. mods, please feel free to delete/edit/move to the PSU topic/remove this note as you see fit depending on whether it fits here!)
