2023-03-14
So here is an interesting topic – a cheap Chinese electric thingie performed better than advertised. Specificially a 240W DC-DC converter; 12VDC in, 24VDC out. It claims to be able to turn 20A of 12VDC into 10A of 24VDC. With the checkered history of price-concious Chinese products one may rightly be skeptical of such claims. And that’s why this genuine Gofotu H10-12-24 both surprises and delights. Not only does it live up to it’s claims, Read more…
2018-08-25
Note: This post a bit of a mess because I kept screwing up and being wrong. I am going to leave it this way because I don’t want to have yet another ‘highlight reel’ of an Internet presence. Learning is a messy endeavor, especially when you’re not some brillient mind that “just gets it”. The impetus behind the last revision of the board was current. Specifically current handling. More specifically issues with current handling. Even Read more…
2017-12-30
Note: I was wrong in the last post. It’s the dsPIC that has a broken UART, not the PIC24. For the last month I have been doing the very unsexy work of grinding out bugs in the code. As I hinted at before my software stack had issues under load. I chose to test the full stack (hardware and software) by subjecting it to a completely unrealistic load. The logic behind it is that the Read more…
2017-11-18
I have been working on finishing up the software related to the board. The only feature that I had left on my wish-list was implementing the calibration stuff. The goal was to have the calibration offset be stored in EEPROM and for it to be adjustable via the text/cli interface and via the binary protocol. The process was going to touch the graphical interface piece, the middle-ware that sits between the interface and the board, Read more…
2017-10-01
Today I was working on my power and serial expansion board for the Beagle Bone Black. This board provides 5VDC to the BBB, breaks out the RS-232 ports, and sequences (or is supposed to anyways) the power to the RS-232 transceivers and the IO board. All that because the BBB can not have any power applied to any of its input pins until a specific pin goes high indicating that the processor has found its Read more…
2017-07-18
So many failures, so little time More failures. Apparently the driver IC I chose to drive the digital outputs is an N-channel driver. Naturally I had it trying to switch +24V. I know what you’re saying: hey Vic, you stupid, you’ll need a charge pump in order to bring the gate voltage above the source voltage. I did not have nor am I willing to incorporate a charge pump. Another failure was failing to properly Read more…
2017-06-12
With all this extra time on my hands while waiting for the PCB to come back, instead of working on the house, playing with the dog, interacting with family, or doing a push-up I decided to test some of the circuitry I’ve already sent off for fabrication. The portion of the circuit under test this time was the the over-voltage crowbar circuit. The basic idea is that if the voltage goes above spec, 5.5V for Read more…