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Thread: Simple idea, simple question....

  1. 09-17-2001, 02:02 AM #1
    cruzc_99
    cruzc_99 is offline
    Constant Bitrate
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    Jun 2001
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    Washington State
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    Post Simple idea, simple question....

    I am almost ready to put everything in my car now, all I need is to get power to my comp. At first I was keepiong up with all of the news here about hacking the atx ps and the whole forward inverter thing, but I soon realized I haven't got time for that, and odds are it would cause more of a headache than needed. So here is my plan.

    To buy a dc to ac power inverter and plug straight into it. And I realize that it is quite inefficient to take the dc current from the battery convert it to ac, and then convert it back to dc once more. But it will be so simple and I assume cheap.

    So the question is which one should I buy? I don't know of any off the top of my head, and they all look the same to me. What would be ideal for our situation? Thanks
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  2. 09-17-2001, 02:35 AM #2
    zootjeff
    zootjeff is offline
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    Post

    My advice is to get the cheepest one you can find. Unless you know the nitty tech specs on them... Most of them are modified sign wave output, which means that they don't make a sine wave, they make a positive square wave followed by a negitive square wave. If you can find one that shares a common ground with the minus side of the battery, that is the way to go. The ones I have had could not be grounded because the ground and neutral terminals were not connected right through to the negitive side of the outlet.. I don't know why they didn't do this, but I know this is the reason people have their inverters fry up. If you get your inverter and measure the gound output with respect to the chasis of the car and you get anything other than 0 volts, (I gor 40 volts AC) then if you try to ground your case, you will have problems. I used a non grounded mpegbox off an inverter for 2 years with no problems at all, I got that inverter for 20 bucks from Frys... A non modified sign wave output isn't that important unless your power supply has issues with filtering and such.

    My 2 cents,

    Jeff
    MPEGBOX - Plexiglass Computer
    www.mpegbox.com
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