Overview

This project is the highlight of my undergraduate education in Electrical Engineering. Each student received individual design goals from our professor and developed their solution independently. In the end, we each built a "magic box" — a self-contained instrument packed with practical features.

Ideas

The box takes 120V AC from the wall through a power inlet module, which distributes power to several subsystems. The fixed ±15V supplies use color-coded banana plugs — red for positive outputs, black for ground — with LEDs indicating power state. A front-panel knob controls the variable supply, whose output is shown on a display. The buck converter operates in either voltage or current mode, indicated by two LEDs, with the output defaulting to 3.3V for digital electronics use.

Implementations

Reflections

Understanding a theory in class and actually making it work in hardware are two very different things. This project made that gap impossible to ignore.