my crazy idea to power a ender3v2 off USBC PD
my crazy idea to power a ender3v2 off USBC PD
So I was thinking of adding USBC PD to my ender 3v2 for a off grid setup. Is it possible or have I gone mad with USBC? I know it's possible with my old monoprice select mini because of its low power requirements.
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Ender3's have a 360W rater power supply, necessary for the hot bed and hot end current. A little bit of forum googling says they often use up to 250w.
USB PD supports up to a max of 240w, and even then only in a very specific 48 volt supply mode. So you might get away with it, buts it's gonna be sketchy, and require more stepping down of the 48v usbPD voltage, and complexity, and cost.
You could theoretically split some of that power from multiple sources though. Run one USB-C line to power the hot end, one to run the bed, and one for the electronics and motors.
Would get pretty complicated pretty quick, but it might work with a LOT of effort.
That would be difficult because you would need to somehow separate the power control MOSFET's from the driver boards so that the controller can still feed them a PWM signal for temp control, but the power would be provided from a separate dedicated usbPD driver board for each set of MOSFETs. At that point it's really not worth the effort.
USBC PD could work for my old monoprice select mini v1 https://youtu.be/VehfqrkoXJA
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Could you not just do something similar to what printers with mains heated beds do and run the bed/hotend heater to a relay and different power bank?
Sure, but on these fully DC printers all the power control hardware is integrated into the main board and supplied from a single main power rail. You'd have to basically build a separate power control board with that would allow you to isolate those MOSFET's on their own power rail and then jump the PWM control signal over to it from the main board. Decent amount of electronics knowledge and skill required to pull that off.
Yeah but why would you need to do that? You're isolating the second power source behind a relay and switching it using the normal controller.