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Beautiful Full Featured Power Supply
5.0
I have fun referring to TTI as "Thurlby-Thandar", the non-acroynmic root of the name. It has such a beautiful British (?British Empire) ring to it.
The MX-180T(P) is a beautiful, well thought-out, full featured power supply. The most extensive range switching around, remote sense, outputs programmable to zero in 1mV steps, outboard digital control option, rich screen display, extensive but intuitive keyboard control, this unit has almost everything.
I would also recommend it over the nominally top model, the 4 output 420W MX-100Q(P). The MX-180T has more evolved range switching and better thought-out variation among output capabilities. I speculate that it's a later, evolved, introduction to the product line even though it is a little smaller.
You get what you pay for, and the MX-180 is also extremely accurate. I ran it at 19.000V against a high end voltmeter, and it measured at 18.999V. Basically 0.005% error. Recommended for demanding quantitative lab work.
Notice above I said it has "almost" everything. There are a couple of enhancements that I would commend to TTI.
Bar graphs in the display, in addition to numeric values, would help tracking moving currents/voltages.
And the brave new world of heterogeneous low voltage logic rails poses some challenges which TTI should look at addressing. Sequencing is an issue. The MX series features programmable rise time steps. But what would really make this useful is a hardware gate control. This would enable triggering a rail from other logic rails rising in the system. It would also enable syncing multiple MX units without writing a lot of test code. I am presently working on a system with 11 voltage rails, 6 of them at 3.3V or less.
A product which TTI should consider would be a 4 output derivative of the MX-180, with the existing 3rd, minor rail, doubled up and equipped with 3 ranges, the lowest range being say 2.7V 6A.
In truth, these low-voltage logic systems are often built with onboard regulators. But there are enough exceptions, such as bringing up one board from a multi-board project with some of the regulators on another board that hasn't been designed yet. This is a growing need.
In all fairness, the other high end makers (for example Rohde & Schwartz) seem to suffer from the same
limitations re multiple low voltage logic rails.
I wouldn't let the above item put you off from this supply, in spite of the circa $1400 price. It's about as good as they get & is a joy to use.
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Doug Widney on
Jul 23, 2020
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