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Introduction And one of those online retailers that has been hard at work improving their current line of products and introducing newer ones every now and then is PCMods.Com. Their first line of Fanbus/Baybus product was the Dual Voltage/LED Baybus Kit, which we reviewed here previously. And now their back with yet another baybus kit, only this time using rheostats. the advantages of rheostats over the conventional switches is that you have a much wider range of control over the fans. Plus, it looks much cooler on yer case than the switches. That's my own personal preference though... :) OK, let's take a quick look at the kit shall we?
The kit came nicely packed in a cardboard box and upon opening the box, you'll find the following;
The first thing that caught my attention was the professionally-made PCB of the Rheobus Kit. While some of us would just be satisfied with a bunch of wires coming in and out of the rheostats, PCMods.Com went one step further and mount all the components onto a PCB. Each rheostats is capable of handling a total of 17Watts of power. YES! You read it right! 17 Freaking Watts! Some of you have been emailing me about the difficulties of finding one with a high power rating but now you dun have too! :O) PCMods.Com also includes a bright Blue LED with each rheostat channel. Nice touch there! If you like switches with LEDs, now you can have rheostats with LEDs too! One terminal of the LEDs are also shielded/protected to prevent short-curcuiting with the other terminal.
At first glance, the rheostats that came with the kit doesn't really look like any I've seen before but it works all the same. Another great addition to the kit is the large black heatsinks. These heatsinks are used to cools the transistor installed in the silver colored cage at center of heat sink. What the transistor does is to buffer the voltage supplied by the rheostat. Another component also caught my eye. Right in the middle of the PCB sits an LM324N chip. According to PCmods.Com, it is a quad op-amp which detects current in the circuit and tells the LEDs to light up! How cool is that? :O) OK, let's get to more details here.....
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