Regulated DC power supplies are indispensable pieces of equipment when it comes to the R&D and manufacturing of electronics. You probably see something similar at your workplace. Turn the switch on and output power… The mechanism itself is simple, so it’s easy to assume that anyone can use this kind of equipment, right?

On the other hand, inquiries like “this model doesn’t match my application” or “I can’t use this the way I thought I could” are something that our customer support encounters on almost a daily basis. As a dedicated power supply manufacturer, we do our best to develop new product design providing an optimal user experience, but it is necessary that the users themselves have a basic level of understanding prior to using regulated DC power supplies. Moreover, customers in the chemistry, machinery and biotechnology fields that don’t specialize in electrical/electronic engineering are on the rise. In other words, our support staff has had their hands full with users who don’t have a strong understanding of electricity fundamentals before handling DC power supplies.

Thus, we came up with the idea of creating an easily digestible comic book story that explained DC power supply basics for not only young electronic engineers but also for engineers in different fields. This story is set in the robotics venture capital firm Zero-One Robotics. This story follows a young, talented engineer (Naoto) who is paired with a female engineer (Minami) with no previous electronic experience, while providing tidbits of DC power supply fundamentals along the way. During the production of this comic, we decided to make two things off limits. Those two things being “circuit diagrams” and “technical jargon.” To be honest, attempting to explain DC power supplies without these shortcuts was quite the uphill battle. A lot of time and effort was spent producing this comic, but we’ve somehow managed to put together a story that is both interesting and useful without coming off as a textbook. We’d appreciate you reading until the very last chapter!

The English title for this story, “Haikawa” is an abbreviation of the Japanese original title: “Ore no Kohai ga Kawaii no ha Tabun Nanika no Machigai da.” Quite a mouthful, right?