Power supply advice, please

dh2005

Hello all,

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I have a 'retro room' in which I keep all of my older/neo-retro gaming equipment. I have more than a dozen machines in there, and due to a lack of TV sockets (even with the use of a high-quality HDMI splitter), all of my 'minis' are attached by the same HDMI and power cables - i.e. depending on which machine I'm using (a NES Classic, SNES Classic, CoreGrafx, Pi 3B+ etc.), I swap it onto/off of the same two cables.

The majority of these machines are capable of being powered by a USB connection to the television, but a couple of them (including the Pi) were found not to work properly (or at all) with this approach. So, I detached the USB cable from the TV and connected it to (what looks like) an old iPhone USB charging plug, and everything then seemed to work.

However, at the time, I wasn't really using my Pi. It powered on, and I figured that was all that I needed to check - but since starting to use it again this week, I'm getting a lot of intermittent faults (e.g. gamepads sometimes working, sometimes not), and I'm also sometimes (but not always) seeing the yellow lighting bolt logo in the top-right corner of the screen to indicate that the Pi isn't getting enough juice.

I know that I used to own an official Raspberry Pi power supply - of course, I now can't find it, so I'm going to have to buy another one... but my question is, could this new power supply 'blow' any of the other machines I'd be attaching it to?

This is likely an idiotic question to anyone with a working knowledge of electronics. Alas, I am not that guy!

Thanks again,

DH.

dh2005

I found my Pi charger!

(well, okay, so my girlfriend found it...)

So, this is a 5.1V/2.5A charger (he said, like he knows anything about it...), and the official guff on the Nintendo website stipulates that the NES Classic Mini charger needs to supply 5V/1A "or more".

Is this going to be okay? Surely the extra 0.1V isn't going to cause a problem (there must be some variance in the voltage anyway, right...?)?

Any advice - however basic - would be appreciated.

Thanks again.

quicksilver

@dh2005 said in Power supply advice, please:

Surely the extra 0.1V isn't going to cause a problem (there must be some variance in the voltage anyway, right...?)?

You are correct, the 0.1V is small enough it shouldn't make any difference. In fact there is likely to be voltage droop before it reaches the device anyway, especially if the cord is long. As for amperage you only need to make sure that you have at least the recommended amount. More amps will never hurt a device and just means you have more overhead to potentially power more peripherals.

dh2005

@quicksilver

Thank you, my friend.