Node Power 4
Wateefy Electronics · NODE Power 4
NODE Power 4
Power Injection & Distribution · 4 Fused Outputs
The same fight against the drop. Half the ports, smaller board.
At a Glance
- 4 fused injection outputsV+ / GND per port, individual blade fuse on each
- 5–48 VDC input, no jumpers5 / 12 / 24 / 36 / 48 V systems, nothing to set wrong
- 30 A through the board at standard coppernot a paid upgrade
- The same protected front end as every NODEtransient clamp, active reverse-polarity block, main fuse
- A fuse and a status LED on every outputthe dead tap shows itself
- Non-destructive reverse-polarity protectionnothing is consumed when someone wires it backwards
- Pure power — no data, no firmwareyour pixel data runs through the strip; this just feeds it
- Smallest board in the familytucks anywhere a run needs a boost
Fuses — up to 30 A max input · 7.5 A blade fitted, 10 A max per output — Keystone 3568, user-replaceable
Why This Exists
Copper drops volts. Long runs go dim.
At 12 V, a long pixel run browns out before it ends. The first pixels are full white; by the far end they sag dim and off-colour, because the thin copper inside the strip dropped the voltage on the way down. Past roughly sixteen feet you cannot win it from one end no matter how fat the feed.
NODE Power 4 feeds fresh, fused power into the middle or far end of the run, so the last pixel sees the same voltage as the first. It is the right size when you have a prop or two that need a boost and do not want to hang an eight-port board to do it — same protection, fewer ports, less board.
Where It Goes
Beside the controller
Same enclosure, same supply. Short jumper from the PSU terminals into Power 4, then heavier-gauge runs out to the injection points. One tidy brick feeds a smaller zone.
Out where it's needed
Run one heavier feed to a remote Power 4 near the far pixels, then fan out short fused taps. Ideal for a single long element — a mega-tree leg, a roofline run — that needs one clean re-feed.
One rule either way: keep the injection board on the same supply and ground as the controller driving those pixels. One PSU per box means injected power shares a ground reference with the data — no ground loops, no back-feeding, no diode-OR games.
The Architecture · Three Power Domains
Same protection as the controllers. Just power.
A small board is not an excuse for a cheap front end. Power 4 sees the same reversed supplies, transients, and shorted runs a controller does, so it gets the same three domains on their own copper planes:
Dirty power in
The input terminal accepts whatever the supply and the wiring hand it. Assumed hostile, isolated to the smallest region of the board possible, nothing downstream touching it directly.
Clean power
Bidirectional transient clamping and an active reverse-polarity blocker. Reverse the supply and the pass element never turns on — no current path, nothing sacrificed, and the red indicator tells you why. Fix the wiring and it recovers on its own.
The fused bus
Clean power passes the main fuse to become the distribution bus. Each of the four outputs taps that bus through its own fuse, with local bulk capacitance right at the terminal. One faulted run opens one fuse. The rest keep the pixels lit.
BEEFCAKE.
The pass element is a 205 A MOSFET on a 30 A board. It will never be the thing that fails.
Voltage Headroom
Rated 5–48 V. The whole range is yours.
There is no buck regulator on this board to cap the input, so it runs the full range the controllers can't — right up to 48 V. At 12 to 36 V the entire power path sits with wide margin. At the full 48 V the semiconductors still run comfortably — pass MOSFET at 80%, ideal-diode controller at 60% of rating — and the 50 V bulk reservoir is sized for the job rather than for a spec-sheet trophy.
Wide open
MOSFET 60% · ideal-diode 45% · bulk caps 72% (1.4× margin). Nothing near a limit anywhere.
Comfortable
MOSFET 80% · ideal-diode 60% · bulk caps run closer to rating. Give the board airflow on a continuous 48 V system and it's set.