Power Supplies

Wall supplies, USB boost, capacitor pulse banks and grounding for solenoid recoil, and why light guns ship with so many supplies.

Firearms

Power Supplies · Deep Dive

Power Supplies

A solenoid asks for amps for milliseconds, and most supplies hate that.

Wall supplies, USB boost, capacitor pulse banks and grounding for solenoid recoil, and why light guns ship with so many supplies.

Photo: RetroShooter RS3 Reaper light guns by RetroShooter

Search every volume:

?

How to search

sten gun
pages with both words
"sten gun"
the words together, as a phrase
sten OR sterling
either one (| works too)
sten -replica
leave out pages that mention “replica”

Without quotes, the last word also matches longer words that start with it (sten finds Stenophylla), and close word forms count (rifle finds rifles). Tick Exact words to match whole words only.

Whole deep dives are listed first, then the pages inside them.

    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 The Problem — What a Light Gun Draws, and Why Every Gun Ships a Different Supply Milliamps for the brain, amps for the kick: the power budget, the solenoid variance behind the zoo of bricks, and what Sinden, GUN4IR, OpenFIRE, RetroShooter and AimTrak actually use
    2. Vol 2 Wall Supplies — Bricks, Pulse Ratings, Hiccup Trips, Connectors and Cable Drop What a brick's label does and does not tell you about a 45 ms solenoid pulse, the trip band that decides whether it fires, the connector and wire between brick and gun, and specific units with dated prices
    3. Vol 3 USB Power Alone — What 500 mA, 900 mA, 1.5 A and 3 A Can Do for Recoil The port's real budget, the boost converters that turn 5 V into a kick, why efficiency and inrush matter, and the arithmetic that explains why every USB-only gun fades in rapid fire
    4. Vol 4 Storing the Pulse — Bulk Capacitors and Supercapacitor Banks Charging slowly and dumping fast: the sizing arithmetic for energy, droop and recharge, why bank voltage changes size but not fire rate, charge-current limiting, balancing a supercap stack, and handling stored energy safely
    5. Vol 5 Grounding, Brown-out and Noise — Why the Gun Resets When It Fires Where the solenoid's return current really goes, what can and cannot reset a Raspberry Pi Pico, flyback and TVS clamps, layout, ferrites, and a diagnosis table for every symptom
    6. Vol 6 Recommendations by Build Stage, and the Bench Tests That Replace Guesses What to power the bench prototype, the wired MP7 donor and the later one-cable guns with, and nine measurements on the lab's supplies and Analog Discovery that turn this dive's assumptions into numbers