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Eeek, what has become of this.... POTs ? Noooooo! Oh well, I guess some people like variability. I like the security of fixed resistors. But I guess if you're not reflowing your own, but rather buying them, then fixed resistors might be frustrating.
Ben: Not AWOL, just making myself more rare around these parts. Don't have as much time these days.
Today I did manage to squeeze in an afternoon of reflowing some of the other driver designs that have been lingering in my Eagle folder for the last two months.
Ha we were just messing with you
I think I'll revisit the pot later when we are sure the caps issue is worked out. Did you see that thread about the 22uf caps actually being mislabeled 2.2uf?
You would happen to have made that one driver we were working on a couple weeks back? You know, that round one? Definitely send me an email about the results! You've got me all excited now
Kizdawg said:Just a note on the pot I just dont understand the reason why pot's are disliked so much I just cant wrap my head arround it.
I'm new here and have asked the same questions - best I can tell it comes from the old-school days of people buying green laser pointers, opening them up and turning a pot until they got higher power - or fried the diode.
It got a bad rap. And once laser makers started building lasers closer to their limits, it didn't work most of the time anyway because the laser was already at its limit and turning the pot just fried it immediately.
So pots got a bad name and now they are frowned upon.
I also think that most of the pots that people put on drivers are crappy pots. I haven't explored this yet, but I'm guessing that GOOD adjustable pots are expensive. So you run into a problem...
Do you spend a lot of your driver budget on an expensive adjustable pot that MIGHT get set once and never changed? Or do you buy a cheap one that might fail and make your driver look crappy? Or do you put a fixed resistor in there and know exactly what it is going to do?
I think most designers go for the fixed resistor.
In terms of the 22uF being labelled 2.2uF, I'm not entirely shocked. A lot of driver designs use capacitance of ~10uF (maybe two of them) in parallel with a 0.1uF ceramic. That's the approach I took with one of the driver designs I reflowed yesterday. A large 100uF tantalum, a 22uF ceramic, and a 0.1uF ceramic.
RHD said:but I HAVE just reflowed a basic Ophir driver, with 5V output for LED readouts. I have extra PCBs if you want one.
No, I didn't. I was going to do that through Dorkbot, but then he added this new system that doesn't allow combination of orders (for shipping purposes). So basically, to order 3 board designs, with the $15 shipping option to Canada, I would have had to pay $45 in shipping, and then have him manually refund me the $30. In terms of complexity, I just wasn't down with dancing that silly jig and having money taken off my CC, and then tossed back on. Plus, the little panels I get fabbed every few months really suck for circular designs, because I have to cut them myself. So, no round 2A boost drivers this time around
In terms of the 22uF being labelled 2.2uF, I'm not entirely shocked. A lot of driver designs use capacitance of ~10uF (maybe two of them) in parallel with a 0.1uF ceramic. That's the approach I took with one of the driver designs I reflowed yesterday. A large 100uF tantalum, a 22uF ceramic, and a 0.1uF ceramic.
Kizdawg: In terms of just "paralleling more", I know that nobody likes to hear the advice that they shouldn't do something....maybe you *don't care* about my input, but I wasn't just shooting down the idea for fun (and heck, why ask if you don't want to hear the answer?).
I've always believed that people need to take the time to understand how a driver works, before using it in their build. That's part of the reason that I've always strayed away from using other people's drivers, when they're all protective and secretive about how those drivers work. In this case, it's important to understand the mechanism of paralleling and Open Boost driver, before just deciding that it's okay to parallel 3 instead of 2.
When you parallel these drivers, you're actually paralleling their current set resistors. As an illustrative aid, you can trace out the circuit on paper, and then parallel each of the four contact points with a second circuit, to see what I mean.
The formula for parallel resistance is:
R = 1 / ( (1 / R1) + (1 / R2) .... etc )
So imagine that you're deciding to parallel three of these drivers set with 0.3 ohm resistors, to produce 633 mA each when used on their own. Your objective would presumably be to achieve 1.9 A when the three drivers were paralleled. What happens when you parallel them? The set resistance that *each driver sees* when used in parallel is 0.1 ohm.
Why does this matter? Because it destroys the notion that each driver is limited to contributing 633mA. In reality, each driver thinks it is trying to regulate to the full 1.9A. But the fact that the other driver(s) is/are contributing to the chore means that each driver doesn't in practice have to actually be responsible for 1.9A.
The challenge, is that they're not intelligent enough to know this, and they're not necessarily going to have the same tolerances across the three drivers. The fact that two in parallel work, is fantastic. Some people who had experimented with this IC in alternate circuit designs before us, weren't able to get them working in parallel. Frankly, a little bit of luck was on our side, but that doesn't mean that the luck can scale. These aren't simple batteries, we can't presume that "paralleling more of them together" will just continuously improve their amperage capabilities. In fact, quite to the contrary, I would expect reliability to fall greatly. These are very high frequency switching regulators, and it's not the case that you can just toss 10 of them together, set for 800 mA, and get a working reliable 8A driver out of it, etc.