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QuinLED Diff-Adv Sender-4 Power requirements

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The power requirements for the Diff-Adv Sender-4 can be more then you’d initially expect. The Diff-Adv Sender-4 supports a wide range of input voltages ranging from 5v up to 48v! The power requirements are however determined by how much cable you have connected between it and the last Receiver board in the chain. The longer this distance is, the less power the Sender-4 will require.

Thus the worst case scenario is when the terminator plug is plugged directly into the Sender-4. With 5v incoming it will then consume up to 500mA! Adding a 100m of cable already reduces this down to about 350mA but when hooking things up generally the worst case scenario should be taken into account.

Using a higher voltage then 5v such as 12v, 24v, 36v or 48v will also lower the used mA respectively through the onboard DC-DC circuit:

  • ~400mA at 5v
  • ~250mA at 12v
  • ~150mA at 24v
  • ~75mA at 48v

Please take all of this into account when powering your Diff-Adv Sender-4.

Sender-4 + Dig-Octa Brainboard

The Dig-Octa brainboard combined with a Sender-4 makes for a very nice small package that can send 4 or with 2x Sender-4 up to 8 LED data signals to locations around your house. Power requirements need to be taken into account however, during the launch video I showed the Dig-Octa brainboard being powered by USB and then using the relay power output to send power to a Sender-4. This can work however I later tested more with this and this isn’t always the case and very much depends on the version of brainboard you are using, please see the following:

  • Dig-Octa Brainboard-32-8L
    • v1r1
      • Max power draw total 1A
        • Using a Sender-4 with power from the brainboard is no problem
    • v1r2
      • Max power draw total 500mA
        • Using a Sender-4 with power from the brainboard is not supported! The power stage on the brainboard is not adequate to power this.
    • v2r1
      • Max power draw total 500mA
        • Using a Sender-4 with power from the brainboard is not supported! The power stage on the brainboard is not adequate to power this.
    • v2rx
      • I’m considering upgrading the power facilities in the future to make this possible, but this hasn’t been planned!

Since the onboard power conversion of the brainboard isn’t really needed for the Sender-4 and there isn’t a power port that outputs unconverted, it’s recommended to hook up the Sender-4 to a power supply directly not through the brainboard.

If you’d still like to use a USB Power supply for convenience reasons you could take an old USB cord, snip off the Micro-USB/USB-C side connector and wire the 2 power wires directly into the Sender-4 and then run another set of 2 wires from this into the Orange port on the Dig-Octa or if it’s a 2 port charger, use a second port and do the same cable trick.