Perhaps delayer of dreams would be more accurate. This is the power supply that isn’t powering my new 3d printer right now:
I spent maybe 30 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn’t upload the customized firmware to my printer before I came across a post where someone had the same error message I was getting and in their case it was because they’d forgotten to turn on the power supply (usb apparently provides enough power to blink the LEDs but not to upload firmware). I pulled out my multimeter and sure enough, 115 volts were going in and 0 were coming out. The only switch on the entire thing is the 115/230 volt switch, which I had set properly to 115.
I asked the people who sell the printer kit I got about it – no there isn’t some power switch that I’d missed and my checks with my voltmeter were exactly what they asked for for diagnosis. Apparently they’ve had some other bad power supplies in the batch mine came from and they put in an order to ship me a new one this week. Once I was told they didn’t see any point to having me ship a dead power supply back to them I opened it up to check the internal fuse (still good) and extract the fan (I’m sure I can find a use for a small DC fan). I didn’t notice it at first, but while I was trying to get the fan unplugged (took pliers) I noticed some slightly singed spots on the circuit board:
I have no idea what that component is for, but it’s got a rather large heat sink (that got hot at some point) but isn’t just glued to the side of the case with thermal paste like almost all the other cooled parts.
I took a bunch of pictures of my printer as it grew from a pile of parts to a complete machine. I’ll sort through them and either post them in the next couple days or when I’ve successfully printed something (and include pictures of calibration prints).