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Powering Coin Mechs

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urbecrisch:


--- Quote from: bfauska on April 17, 2007, 01:49:38 am ---WOW, I was guessing (albeit educated guessing) and what do you know 1/4 amp x 12v (if you pull from your PC PSU's 12v rail) = 3watts.  3=few.  Good guess I suppose, and there you have it, plenty of power left for some other lights, your MB, HDD, etc...

--- End quote ---

 :dunno  :dizzy: I have no idea what this means! LOL. SO... I can plug my coin lamps into my CPU?  Sorry, I'm still confused.

scotthh:

bfauska was using Ohm's Law to show a single bulb (12 volts * 0.25 amps) would draw 3 watts. Your standard PC power supply provides several hundred watts. In other words, a couple of little bulbs wouldn't strain your PC's power supply.

If you use 12 volt light bulbs,  I think you'd want to use the PC's 12 volt rail, not the 5 volt rail.

If you look at your NovaGemCDR's, you'll see how to hook up a LED to a pushbutton. The NovaGem looks a lot like this Happ illuminated Pushbutton. Happ has LED parts for it that might work for you. Radio Shack sells a wide variety of LEDs, they are in that set of drawers in the back with all of the other parts.

If you get LEDs, you need to worry about the resistance. A number of threads here point to this calculator to figure out what resistor you need to connect. Resistors should be in the same set of drawers at Radio Shack. Look at this thread for an example of the LED and resistor "math".


bfauska:

If you just want to use the lamps that are in the buttons to begin with, it would be best to know a little more about them, but they should work.  I would pull out the lamp and see if I could find any information about the voltage and wattage.  As long as the voltage is more than or equal to 12 volts you should use the 12 volts from your PC power supply, if it is between 5 and 12 volts use the 5.  Running with less voltage than the lamp is rated for will make it a little dimmer, but actually make it last longer.  As far as the wattage goes, as long as it is less than like 10 or so I wouldn't worry about it, especially if you are running a computer power supply of 300 watts or more. 

Still the LEDs are a brighter, cooler, less power consuming option.  With a little research you can find out which resisters to use to put the LEDs on the 5v from your PC.  I think but am not sure and hopefully somebody will either confirm or deny this, that you can actually run two 3volt LEDs in series on the 5v line w/o any trouble.

Somebody please check that last statement, I am curious about it.  Thanks.

urbecrisch:

Here's a tutorial I found regarding coin lamps from pc power.  Looks like 4 LED lights can be powered through 12v on PC power supply.  I will do the same since I want to hook up 4 LED lights on my CAB. 

http://joelsgadgets.com/CoindoorPage2.HTML

Here's another
http://www.retroblast.com/articles/coindoor.html

There's a video on the bottom of this page showing you what to do.

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