ok you asked for it now here I go:
first you need to decide what you need and how fancy.
you can use just battery,s and maybe a charger for them, or lets get fancyier.
we need current according to the size of cathode (current density) depending on the size of your cell and cathode area, these will need to be decided and caculated, also consider if plating or electrowinning and if you are going to use a single, series, or parralel plating setup, your voltage will usually be low DC voltage.
the better the regulation of voltage and current(AMPS) the better our results will be.
so we need a transformer to step down the voltage these are alternating current we need low voltage direct current and regulated.regulating voltage and current.
lets look at options we can control the primary of transformer to lower the secondary voltage output, this can be done with taps in winding turns of primary and a switch, or better a variac ( varible transformer)also called(varible autotransformer) they usually look like a large doughnut wound coil with a carbon brush on a knob to dial up how much voltate it outputs, this will give our main transformer selected voltage and then it will give a secondary output accordingly.
another way to do this and more complicated but better regulation is with SCR's silicone controlled resistors , they have three terminals, a gate-anode and cathod , the current on gate controlls the anode to cathode current, wich in turn controlls our transformer which controls the output, the SCR will need a circuit for controlling of gate usuall with a feedback circuit.
so if you got this far lets keep going now we have a controll of voltage AC output what about current? well size of transformer and its wire can limit that, or maybe we want better control, we could use SCR's here again with another circuit to regulate current (SCR's also are like diodes current only goes through it from anode to cathode so that takes care of DC here). but this is getting a little more complicated so lets look at other options of controlling current, ok how about light bulbs them things put in series with our output will limit current, and with less waste than large resistors burning up our power as heat and the light bulb can be an indicator of our cell current showing us if our electrolyte is low on metals (ressistance of electrolyte, or we can use transistor circuits but there we go getting complicated lets just make this thing work ,
so now we have a regulated voltage and a regulated current (unless we went with SCR) we need direct current, to change alternating current to direct current we can use diodes, also called rectifiers, a single diode, but thats not good we cannot plate well, two diodes still not good enough, FOUR diodes, ahhh yes a bridge rectifier, this will give us more power and a smoother output, Ripple alot less. what you want it smooth well a large capacitor will do that so throw one of them on there, oh this is sounding easier its just a common power supply found in almost any piece of electronic equiptment but not in these new fangled computers they use switching power supplies, well we could use one of them but plating doesn't need to be that smooth, and we would not have the controll that we would with our homebuilt power supply and it probably would not hold up to plating for long,
so we now need specifications and ranges, for voltage current once we have decided on those we use OHMs law and a few other bits of math and caculate our parts sizes , we want this to last for along time getting our metals moved in our electrolytes, then we can search our junk bins for them parts and with a little solder and some old parts and slap one together put it in a box and some type of cooling circuit or heck just use those computer fans to get rid of the heat this thing disipates.
so lets start on a versitile supply for electroplating.
voltage range current range? cell sizes we want to use it on????
decisions decisions :roll:
