Diode Tutorial & How to build an AC to DC power supply
Why Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange recommends it
Electronics Stack Exchange users link it when someone needs a beginner-friendly explanation of diodes, rectification and building a basic power supply, including how parallel diodes behave.
Recommended by 4 people across 4 different months, 2011 to 2015.
What it is
An 11-minute tutorial from Afrotechmods covering the basics of diodes and bridge rectifiers, then walking through building a simple unregulated AC to DC power supply for loads from a few mA to several amps. It is part of a series that also covers transformers and regulated supplies.
What people said
Recommends AndrejaKo · 2011-10 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “5v Power Supply Tutorial”
Well typical power supply consists of a transformer follower by a Graetz bridge rectifier, a big capacitor and a regulator and components required for it to work. For the safety side, you'll at least want a fuse on the transformer. If you can get a regulator which has current limiting and short-circuit protection, you'd make life much easier for yourself. There are 7805 regulators with that features, like for example L7805AB from STMicroelectronics. Just be sure to read the datasheet of the exact regulator you have and confirm that it has short-circuit protection and thermal overload protection. When I was building my own "bench" power supply, I had problems finding a nice tutorial. There ar
Recommends sptrks · 2012-02 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Applets illustrating the operation of diodes and transistors”
Here is a really good series of videos on transistors: one [LINK] and two [LINK] . This [this video] next video is on diodes and rectification but you you should definitely check how his whole electronics series.
Recommends AK_ · 2014-08 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Diodes in parallel or series”
This answer is very misleading at point 3. Connecting diodes in Parallel does not increase the carrying current of the diodes. An good explanation of what happens when you connect diodes in parallel can be found here [this video]
Recommends got trolled too much this week · 2015-01 · Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange · on “Get clean 9VDC power from 9VAC using a LM317T”
SE is very bad at learning everything from scratch... you need to do background reading elsewhere. There are a lot of tutorials on the net and in basic electronics books on building such a simple power supply. You need to understand the various parts of this circuit before you dive into building it... or else you won't know how to test and troubleshoot it. If you prefer watching videos, start with transformers [LINK] , rectifiers [this video] and then regulators [LINK] .