Does it ever just kill you that someone in a factory somewhere got to have all the fun of assembling your bench tools? There are a lot of questionable circuit boards floating around the Internet, and they can replicate practically any section of a circuit. When it comes to putting a prototype these days you can pretty much just buy each block of your system’s overview flowchart and string them together. [GreattScott!] combines a few of these into a relatively useful variable power supply with current limiting.

Admittedly, this is more of academic exercise if your only metric for success is monetary savings. Comparable power supplies can be purchased for the same amount of local currency as the parts in this build. However, there is something to be said for making it yourself.

The core of this build is based around the LTC3780, a bit of silicon from LT that offers both buck and boost converting along with a current control mode. It’s useful for a lot of things. The here is rated for up to 130 watts of power, which makes is a decent amount of power for a bench supply.

With a few modifications, like replacing the world’s most untrustworthy potentiometers and adding a nice ABS box, the build is completed. Along the way, [GreatScott!] offers a few tricks for testing and some reminders of how not to make yourself dead when playing with electricity.

The end is a working lab bench supply project that can easily keep a hacker entertained on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

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