I bet most of you haven’t considered how you wire up a bench power supply – you just set the voltage and current limit and off you go.

Some supplies have voltage sense inputs which are usually tied to the output terminals with a metal shorting link. When not using the voltage sense you should connect the load to the sense terminals and not the output terminals. The reason is that if the shorting link on the terminals isn’t tight the output voltage can rise. Internally in the PSU the sense and output terminals are often linked with diodes to prevent the voltage rising beyond 0.6v per terminal, so if both links are loose the output could be 1.2v too high which might be enough to damage the unit under test.

I would recommend that you always connect the load to the sense terminals as these are the reference points for the PSU. So if you set 1.5v output voltage, and the PSU is running within its limits, it will provide 1.5v across the sense terminals even if the links are loose.

Also while I’m talking about PSUs –  if you have a multi output PSU, try and run a separate ground wiring to your board for each rail. Don’t be tempted to just link all the grounds at the PSU as the voltage drop across the ground cable can be considerable and can upset the other rails.