Volatile:
You can gain a rhudimentary understanding of converter topologies by doing a wiki seach for boost converter, buck converter, and flyback converter.
These are the primary switching power supply designs currently in use, each offering their own advantages. Using readily available parts and
single-chip converters, switching power supply design is within everyone's reach these days.
No longer do you need massive iron cores and heavy copper windings to achieve a given output, a handful of parts and some quick study can get you the
supply you need in short order.
In the old days of strictly linear power supplies, you might have an enormous transformer, one or several very large capacitors, and a rectifier of
some sort to get an unregulated ouput, to which you would add a string of pass transistors, a voltage reference, and a driver circuit to maintain the
voltage at a regulated level. The more voltage/current out, the bigger everything had to be since it was all running off the line voltage at 50 or
60Hz. A 1000W supply might have weighed 50lbs or more, and been well over a cubic foot.
Now that same 300/500/1000W power supply could weight 3 or 4 lbs, and be no larger than a box of crackers. All of this brought to you by the
efficiency of higher operating frequency and switching elements (FETs, MOSFETs, etc..) whos performance approaches perfection with almost zero "on"
resistance and almost infinite "off" resistance, coupled with very low switching time between off and on, and just as important, on and off!
DAS
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). However, this was the first (and
so far only) time that it caused the GFCI to go off.