I love these Wizard of Wire differential receivers. They connect directly to a Mean Well PSU, and the angled design means they still fit in a standard Harbor Freight or similar plastic ammo box.

There is one problem though… The pixel ports and power injection ports are fused at (and are rated for a maximum of) 5A each. That’s great for 12v folks, since the typical PSU they use is 29A, but for us 5v folks with typical 60A PSUs- this leaves us well-short on power.

So, here’s what I did to fix the problem:

First, you need a big-ass heavy-duty high-temp soldering iron. I think 100W minimum. A little wimpy solder station/rework iron won’t cut it.

I got the one I used at a yard sale, but you can find new ones online, although I’ll admit they are a bit pricy. It’s possible one of those solder “guns” like an old Weller will work too. This was the cheapest I could find that should work:

Where the two boards are connected, there are four very-very large solder pads that connect the PSU terminals to the rest of the board. The one closest to the RJ45 jack is positive, and the other is negative.

All I did was solder some heavy-gauge wire to each of these. It helps to pre-tin each wire first with solder, and then heat up the wire and pad and feed in more solder. Again- you need a large-hot iron to do this- you want the whole thing to melt and fuse.

When finished, you have a couple of large wires that can handle most of the remaining capacity of the PSU. I used 14GA wire which is rated for 32A in “Chassis” wiring. It would have been better to use 12Ga, but that’s what I had in-stock, and I don’t run any of my PSUs at full current anyway.

Here is what it looks like in the box…

Really quick, I put those little voltmeters in almost all my PSU and controller builds now. Here is how I hooked it up to these differential receivers…

It’s just alien-taped to an empty spot on the back of the board, and soldered to the two pads you can see in the picture. These are just for one of the power injection terminals.

I use a lot of these in our show. You can actually cram THREE differential receivers in one ammo box with a PSU. One of these direct-connected like the above, and two stand-alone ones with a PSU mounting plate (or even hook-and-loop tape). Most are either single or double diffs using these.