Re: Universal power supply for PCs, setting voltage

In sci.electronics.repair, on Tue, 1 Apr 2025 11:54:38 -0400, Paul
<[email protected]> wrote:

>On Tue, 4/1/2025 10:40 AM, micky wrote:
>
>> 
>> I only wanted that to charge my phone.  Had a hotel and used the
>> computer there. 
>> 
>> But when I do foreign travel, even if I have rented a room, it can be
>> too far to drive back at night just to return the next morning, so i
>> often sleep in the car, and use the laptop before sleeping and in the
>> morning.  (ne time I used while driving it to find a particular stream
>> in a "park" and I got interested in having GPS for the laptop, but none
>> of them had iirc very good reviews and now I can't remmeber why the
>> phone wasn't good enough anyhow.)  
>> 
>> But I will make sure any rental car in the future has a cigarette
>> lighter. or power port and young'ns call them. 
>
>I have a GPS here from Adafruit that seems to work OK.
>It can pick up a few birds while sitting in the house and
>sitting on a window ledge inside. (It can see seven satellites,
>but only two have "green" signals and full signal strength
>inside the house.)
>
>It can scan some number of channels, and once it has acquired
>a set, keep those working channels operational, and get a result.
>It might deliver four messages per second, serially. You can
>program the baud rate.
>
>The trouble with hobby designs, is they're not packaged for
>trips (too many wires). 

I see what you mean:  https://www.adafruit.com/product/5440

>A commercial one will be a blob and a single cable.
>But we don't know how technically sophisticated those are.
>
>And as the standards for these slowly change, eventually
>you might need a new one, for some whizzy quality improvement.
>For navigation, you don't need bomb-site accuracy.
>
>The Adafruit one has a PPS signal (Pulse Per Second) and
>the edge of that signal is fairly precisely aligned to the
>official time. It's hard to get that edge into the computer
>without degrading the precision. That should be able to do a
>better time alignment, than the Windows w32time over-the-network
>update.

I really can't remember why the phone was not good enough. Surely it
wasn't just because the screen is so small. And I did find what I was
looking for.   I'll probably remmeber next time in the same situation,
but until then, I will just ponder it. 

Allon, I only do stuff like this in good weather so I'd probably have
the car windows open.  But not the windshield, rear window, or roof. :-(
>   Paul