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Power supply for this little fella (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all,

I bought a Sinclair ZX81 on a garage sale some days ago for around 12 USD as a non-tested item as the guy said he had no wires to even try and run it. I have a couple of RF cable kicking about from my Atari 2600 and ZX Spectrum, so I have this basis covered.

According to the manual LINK it takes 9V 700mA unregulated (I'm not sure what it means) 3.7mm jack power supply. I have a 9V DC 1A jack power supply I bought for the Atari (it's not an original one - a unbranded one) and I tried to use it, but to no success. Manual tuning my TV same as with Spectrum and Atari, and no signal.

I was wondering if maybe the power supply is not up to spec? I was thinking that maybe 1mA is too much to power it up? But I went online to look for an unbranded ZX81 power supply and they are running 2A so I'm not sure what's going on here.

Is it busted? Or should I get one of those unbranded power supplies that say they are made for ZX81 to test it?

Thanks :)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

This is the correct answer.

To simplify the current-aspect: When in comes to powersupplies, it helps to think about mA or Amperes as "capacity". Under normal circumstances, too much won't hurt. In many cases, too little might actually work too. So when searching for a suitable powersupply, the Voltage should be the same, amperes should be "enough", and the polarity must match.

If your hardware lists Watts instead of Amperes, you can use Ohms law to calculate between the two:
P = U x I
Or in other words: Watts (W) = Voltage (V) x Current (A)