Friday, October 27, 2006

Mid-Terms are Over, Mostly..

Which means, I can take a little break from the world of academics and focus on the power supply. Mikel at the FM Tuner Group suggested I should upgrade one cap to an 80V or better unit, which is on order, but everything else I think I need I have, so Saturday I begin the overaul, and perhaps begin the mechanical drawings on a PS upgrade.

You know, many people whose opinion I respect say that the power supply in the 3001/A is very good, and I mostly agree, but it's not what I would call spectacular. In particular, you have a situation where all of the filter and storage capacitors are on high impedance paths away from the voltage regulation stages. The voltage regulators are kind of live and let live when it comes to all of the different boards they supply. Each board contributes a portion of the overall filtering, but electrically each board is far from the regulators, so sags in the main regulators may take unnecessarily long periods of time to correct. It's all very touchy-feely. Each board can affect all the other boards to some extent.

So, my research is going to be in creating a daughter board to allow the regulator transistors to dominate the output voltages, letting the filtering on the individual boards relax and no longer worry about what the other boards are doing to the supply, and shorten the effective distance between the regulators and the boards themselves. Maybe. I only sold a few of the output boards, so if I do this next step it will be a one off. The good news is that from my initial research I can do it all in a non-destructive manner. I think. Well.....

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