Hazard due to power supply capacitor

[owhite]

Hey people,

if you consider a circuit diagram like the full wave bridge power supply shown on this page:

http://www.plitron.com/pages/technote.htm

when I built this circuit I used a 30,000uF capacitor at 80V.

Okay, so suppose the power supply is turned on, and then switched off. The capacitor gets charged at some lethal amount, and gets connected to a gecko drive. I've been debugging the gecko which has a plug connector. I've been carefully slipping off the connector and discharging across the caps with a pair of plyers.

Well, I dunno, I guess once the whole system is debugged then maybe it wont really matter if the caps are charged up. But there will always be a gazillion joules waiting across the terminals of my power supply. What I'd like to avoid is leaving a lethal dose in those capacitors. Think of it as protection for my cats.

Owen

[sendkeys]

[Mariss Freimanis]

1) The drives discharge the capacitor within a second of you turning off the AC power.
2) There are 96 Joules stored at 80VDC (J = C * V^2 / 2) but the voltage is too low to do more than tickle a little bit.

Mariss