Electrical power

Mains surge suppressor teardowns

I saw a request for circuit diagram in Facebook electronics group: Hello feds. Required surge protector circuit. Working on 220v. 50hz 10amps load. I first offered this reverse engineering of one commercial mains surge protector “Ahlstrom 23 368″. The manufacturee component codes of the exact components used. S20K250 is a varistor for 250V AC /

Short circuit protection relay circuit fail

I saw at Facebook a video 12 v Short Circuit Protection and same for 220 volts (https://www.facebook.com/108281974135756/posts/166052965025323/). It was advertised as a short circuit protection relay circuit that will turn off the power when output is short circuited. This seems to be a quite popular circuit idea, because I saw several very similar circuit designs

Cyber-attacks to power utility

Cyberattacks targeting a local power utility or end-user systems could propagate to the national bulk-power system and affect millions of people. We know that terrorists and state-sponsored actors already have the capabilities to disrupt a country’s power supply. The human costs of power-supply disruptions can go far beyond inconvenience. On 1 May, Donald Trump signed

Your computer can leak data in many ways

Here is some interesting information on leaking information from air-gapped computers. Most methods shown here use computer power supply to leak some pieces of information. But there are also some other methods shown. A researcher from Israel described a new method to covertly steal highly sensitive data from air-gapped computers using power supply units. Dubbed

Electrical car charging cables

There is a growing interest and investment in electric vehicles infrastructure. To change those electric vehicles here are many different options how this can be done – with different benefits and disadvantages. The charging time depends on the battery capacity and the charging power. The charging power depends on the power available from the power

Proposed LED/wired IoT standard can reduce energy use

While switching to LED lighting certainly helps reduce power consumption, we can do more. Each conventional mains powered LED bulb has its own AC/DC power supply, which is needed for bulbs to be compatible with AC wiring and lighting fixtures with sockets designed 100 years ago. Having individual power supplies adds cost and decreases efficiency