That's good work, Peter. What you wrote makes perfect sense.. thank you!
The PSU in the A2000 is going to be quite a bit more substantial than that
in the A500 - IIRC, the A500 used a large-ish 'brick' supply like the
C-128, something on the order of 50W total output. Between the much larger
motherboard and all of the available expansion slots, the A2000 is going to
need several times that.
I think it's safe to say that they didn't mind 200-400mA being sucked out
of the A2000 controller ports, if need be. We'll probably stick with a
fuse, reset-able or otherwise.
On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 5:03 AM, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 01:59:36PM -0500, drlegendre .
wrote:
[...]
Now the schematics we have do show the fuse, I
believe it's indicated as
F1.
But there's no rating on the diagram. Can
anyone confirm that this is
actually a 4A fuse? Why on earth would they have such a high-rated fuse
protecting those lines?
I went and looked at the schematics of a few other Amiga models to see how
the
mouse/joystick ports are implemented. For all but one of the models I
checked,
pin 7 of both joystick/mouse ports are commoned and are connected to +5v
via an
unmarked fuse. So that's not much help.
We hit the jackpot with the A500 though: each pin 7 is connected
separately to
+5v via a 4R7 current-limiting resistor. Ohm's Law tells us that it limits
the
short-circuit current to 1A, but since this would mean dumping 5W into
what is
probably a 0.5W resistor, what you effectively have there is a fuse that
makes
a nasty stench when it blows.
What sort of controller-port peripheral device
could ever need that much
current - and is a common DB-9 connector (or for that matter, the PC
board
traces) even capable of that kind of current?
400mA maybe?
The 4R7 effectively limits it to 100mA per port, so I'd be tempted to go
even
lower than that to ~200mA. Further, a resettable fuse is cheap[0] and will
save
you having to wave the soldering iron the next time the port is shorted
out.
[0] Farnell are listing suitable fuses for under 50p.