Project: Making a Constant Dc Power Supply

How Electricity Reaches our home?

Why do we need a Constant Dc Power?

The power that reaches our home has an average value of 220V

This 220V power is not suitable for many electronic devices like, your
mobile phone, laptop, desktop-pc, speaker and most of your charging
devices

This power needs to be converted to a constant DC

 Making a DC power supply

Have you ever notice your cellphone charger?

What is an Alternating Current (AC) ?

Coming from the wall, the AC alternates from a minimum to a maximum voltage at a
frequency of 60 Hz. That is what powers all of the AC appliances in your house and shop, and
it looks like the graph below. After the transformer, the graph is similar, except the sine
wave has a smaller amplitude.

A simple graph depicting AC power

Rectification

The first stage of this power supply is a rectifier. The rectifier is an arrangement of diodes
that only allows current to flow in one direction. Think of a one-way check valve for water.
Because of the arrangement of diodes in the full wave rectifier used in this design, the
positive part of the AC signal passes unimpeded and the negative part of the AC signal is
actually inverted and added back into the output signal from the rectifier. Now our signal
looks like this:

A graph of AC power after a trip through a rectifier.

Smoothing

Now we have at least consistently positive voltage levels, but they still dip down to zero 120
times per second. A large capacitor, which can be thought of like a battery over very short
time periods, is installed across the circuit to even out these rapid fluctuations in power. The
capacitor charges when the voltage is high and discharges when the voltage is low. With the
help of the capacitor, the voltage curve looks like this:

A graph of AC power when smoothed by a capacitor. 

Regulation

At this point, we use an integrated circuit (IC) to consistently regulate the voltage to exactly
the desired level. It is important in sizing the components for all of the previous stages to
drive this IC with a voltage level sufficiently higher than the regulated voltage such that the
remaining dips 120 times per second will not drop below the required minimum input
value. However, you do not want to drive it with too high a voltage, as that excess power will
be dissipated as heat. The voltage curve at this point is (ideally) a DC signal at the desired
voltage; a horizontal line.
No dips in this graph of DC power. 

What you’ll need

To build this specific power supply, you will need the following:

 Ac power supply. There must be one lying around somewhere…

 SPST 120V toggle switch
 Transformer with an input voltage of 120V and an output voltage around 24V to keep
the Vin for the 7812 regulator above the minimum.
 Full-wave bridge rectifier
 6800 uF capacitor
 2x 100nF (exact value is not crucial) capacitors
 2x 1 uF (exact value is not crucial) capacitors
 7805 5V voltage regulator
 7812 12V voltage regulator

Circuit Diagram
There are various websites, where you can design your circuit and get pcb with
all the components mounted on it.

The final product look like this--------