-3

Same as the title : Is there such a thing as a 24V DC computer ?

There is a 5V computer called raspberry PI, but I'm looking for something like 800W-1000W computer working with 24V DC.

bob dylan
  • 255
  • 3
  • 11
  • 4
    Yes, there are a lot of computers that run on 24vdc, mostly for industrial uses. – Ron Beyer Jul 31 '19 at 22:22
  • 1
    Have you ever heard of a DC DC converter? – Voltage Spike Jul 31 '19 at 22:31
  • @VoltageSpike I'm more looking for a native 24V computer. (Like a 24v rpi if you will) – bob dylan Jul 31 '19 at 22:37
  • @bobdylan Like the logic gates run at 24V? – Voltage Spike Jul 31 '19 at 22:43
  • @bobdylan there's no native 24V computers. See my answer. – Marcus Müller Jul 31 '19 at 22:55
  • If you want to do a lot of calculations then looking at the voltage won't give you any information. It's like looking at different cars and you care about which that has the longest mileage per tank, but instead of looking at the motor/tank you ask what the top speed is. You're asking the wrong question for what you want to know. You should look into FPGA's if you want to mine bitcoins. Those or GPU's are the ones that will do what you want. – Harry Svensson Jul 31 '19 at 23:44
  • The title is my question, I'm looking for a 24V computer ready system. Mining bitcoin is just an idea. 24v is just to have potentialy high Watt value. (And my batteries are 24V) – bob dylan Jul 31 '19 at 23:49
  • Get yourself a 24V→5V DC-DC converter and use the Raspberry Pi you mentioned. It won't need 800W though but only 4W. If you want to mine bitcoins or something like that, use 200 of those and the Pi4. It will take some time until you get back your investment of about 15k€ though. – Janka Aug 01 '19 at 00:13
  • You can get a 24V to 5V converter, and connect it to a Raspberry Pi, and if you like then put those two things into a box. Then you have a 24V Raspberry Pi. – user253751 Aug 01 '19 at 00:14
  • 2
    I was ideally looking for a 24V DC modular mainboard. Let's say being able to plug in several PCI express GPUs. (PCI express is 12V I think) - to reach 1000W ? Maybe difficult. – bob dylan Aug 01 '19 at 00:18
  • 4
    In what fashion does asking the question "does this thing exist" get put on hold? I laughed the first time I saw a comment in another SE about a question shot down here getting migrated to the other SE being a perfectly valid question, but now I understand what they were saying. I know this doesn't specifically follow the "electronics design" questions guidelines of this SE, but these type of questions are asked here all the time, have valid answers, and *should* be within the scope of this SE, lest other less-qualified people in other SEs are asked to answer, or the question is just killed. – Hitek Aug 01 '19 at 04:00
  • 2
    And like I said, the question does have an answer. Most Car PC power supplies openly available on the market(without me even mentioning a brand or product) happily accept up to 30 to 36 Volts, and can be used in parallel with the proper precautions and cable arrangements, supplying 800 to 1000 Watts in unison easily... – Hitek Aug 01 '19 at 04:04
  • 1
    @bobdylan - This question is actually probably not formatted properly for this SE. It seems to me that a better question, along the lines of "Can an existing standard PC or newly built PC be made to be natively powered by 24 Volts?" would be better accepted and answered here, and should probably be posted as a separate question... – Hitek Aug 01 '19 at 04:27
  • @Hitek Re "in what fashion are 'does this thing' exist" questions off-topic: well, they are not really great questions. "No" isn't a possible answer; unless the thing asked for is physically impossible, someone somewhere might (and quite likely has) build one. Now, that makes it clear that it's actually a "is something like that *available*" question, and with the context, that's too close to either being a shopping question, or too broad. – Marcus Müller Aug 01 '19 at 07:44
  • 1
    @Hitek Yeah I keep getting shutdown on almost everything I say in this stack exchange platform. (I'm new here but we don't have this problem on Stack Unix&Linux and programming.) For example check my post that was marked as duplicate : https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/450512/why-does-the-voltage-of-a-lead-acid-battery-drop-with-load (You can see "Andy aka" a user with 250k points agreeing with me, so i'm not a "whining little b*tch". I'm just very intrigued about the community here, often rude and condescending as well, that's a little sad to see on a learning platform...) – bob dylan Aug 01 '19 at 09:31
  • 3
    @Hitek I think the problem is that "does this exist?" is really a disguised shopping question. You can only prove the affirmative by providing a concrete example. An answer of simply "yes" usually gets shot down as unhelpful, and an answer of simply "no" is unverifiable on its face. So, if you don't want shopping questions on your site you probably don't want "does it exist" questions. – Elliot Alderson Aug 01 '19 at 11:51
  • 2
    Now I'm banned from asking questions on this site, this is insane. hahaha. I think I will leave this community forever. Bye all, have a great day ! – bob dylan Aug 01 '19 at 16:49

2 Answers2

8

None of the computers you use run at 220V or 120 V or 5V – there's a lot of different voltage supplies for a lot of different parts of the computer, integrated in the computer.

For example, the CPU in the raspberry Pi doesn't run at 5V, but a voltage significantly lower than that. The conversion from 5V to what the CPU does is done on-board. Same goes for your PC.

The job of converting the power source voltage to the different voltages your computer needs is done by power supplies.

So, what you're looking for is a PC power supply that converts ca 24V to all the voltage rails a PC needs. Those exist.

General remark from my direction: Even if your energy comes free, it's questionable at the current mining rates that PC-style hardware would ever return its own cost in mined bitcoin. If that weren't the case, there'd be enough people with much larger installations of practically free energy reducing the bitcoin price until a hardware cost – bitcoin price equilibrium was reached. Basic supply and demand.
Don't beat a dead horse – if you have electrical energy to spare, you can actually do something productive with it, like growing tomatoes, refining metals, desalinating water and irrigating the desert, folding proteins to cure cancer, render 3D videos …

Marcus Müller
  • 88,280
  • 5
  • 131
  • 237
  • 1
    Thank you for this nice and thoughtful answer. I'm looking for things to play with but the main goal is just to learn new things along the way, I've just started electricity and electronics. If I can do something remotely useful, why not. :) – bob dylan Jul 31 '19 at 23:01
  • 1
    I've seen some computer power supply 24V DC input but prices are incredibly high. – bob dylan Jul 31 '19 at 23:04
  • 1
    what are you expecting? The prices of normal computer power supplies are in fact incredibly low, due to economics of scale and because mass user equipment has low requirements on reliability, unlike 24V supplies which are almost certainly meant for industrial applications. – Marcus Müller Jul 31 '19 at 23:27
  • Well this is why I'm looking for a 24v ready computer. – bob dylan Jul 31 '19 at 23:30
  • For posterity looking at this post : "Banana Pi W2" can run on 12V DC. (And some other models from Banana Pi) That's progress. – bob dylan Jul 31 '19 at 23:40
  • 2
    @bobdylan: the Banana Pi may accept a 12 volt power supply, but there will be voltage regulators on-board to reduce that input voltage to 5 volts for some parts, and 3.3 volts (or less) for the actual processor. – Peter Bennett Aug 01 '19 at 01:03
  • 1
    @bobdylan no, it's not progress. You'v e missed my point: **All** computers don't accept an 24 V input voltage. All computers need voltage converters to supply them with the voltages they need internally. You still "only" need a power supply that goes from 24 V to whatever the specific type of computer you want to use needs. You've just gone from a 1 kW numbercrunching beast computer to a single-board low-power ARM. The next thing would be to notice there's pocket calculators that can work if their solar cell is shone at by a 24V lamp – you really need to start to define what you want to do. – Marcus Müller Aug 01 '19 at 07:42
  • Sorry I'm missing something because I really don't understand what you are saying. Are you saying that it's in theory "impossible" to have a 24V mainboard with several PCI EXPRESS slot powered themselves by the same power source to reach a computer that will be around 800W ? Why not, my power supply can do that from 220V ac. (Of course, pci express is 12V so that's an issue as well. But i see on wikipedia a 8-pin power connector that can reach 150W to plug on a GPU.) 6*150W + ~10W mainboard ~= 910W. – bob dylan Aug 01 '19 at 09:22
3

There are ATX power supplies meant for solar systems that take in 24V and convert it to standard voltages needed by a standard computer. Basically using a DC-DC converter you can power any computer you want.

Justme
  • 127,425
  • 3
  • 97
  • 261