Lidmotor's Penny circuit help needed.

[TinselKoala]

I don't know how to interpret what you are showing on the scope. You may have to go back to the single-shot search like I showed before, until you have a setting that displays a whole period in one screen, without clipping voltage.

It sounds like your LED model is quite close to what I'm actually getting with these LEDs. How does your sim tell you the LEDs are shining? I mean does it light up the symbol or what?

I don't think the circuit being inside the toroid makes a difference but it's easy enough to check... if this battery ever runs down, I'll separate out the board from the toroid and test again. Since I heated the battery up, it's back up to over 340 mV again... actually just now went down to 339 mV. Still oscillating at 492.3 kHz, with 1420  mV peaks.

[Legalizeshemp420]

Those little arrow symbols on the LED light up with the color of the LED being tested.

[Legalizeshemp420]

MPSA18 backwards.

[TinselKoala]

OK.... that's the envelope of the single pulse. It doesn't repeat this, it just does it one time when you apply power?

I can see that there is more power dissipated in the MPSA18 than in the BC337, certainly. But why don't our waveforms look more similar? I'm pretty burned out tonight, I've been working all afternoon, but I'll do some more testing after I've had some shut-eye.

Sometimes JT circuits need to be kicked into oscillation. You could try putting momentary-contact switches between base and emitter, and between base and collector. Punching the switch for a few microseconds or a millisecond might work. At least the real hardware often works like this, even with big JTs using 2n3055s.


ETA: Can you move your trigger point over to the right a bit? You have it at the leftmost edge of the screen, and this prevents you from seeing what happens in the "pretrigger" time. In most of the shots I've shown, my trigger is set horizontally at screen center.  Try dragging the triangular icon at the top left of the screen, over to the third or fourth horizontal division.

[Legalizeshemp420]

OK.... that's the envelope of the single pulse. It doesn't repeat this, it just does it one time when you apply power?

I can see that there is more power dissipated in the MPSA18 than in the BC337, certainly. But why don't our waveforms look more similar? I'm pretty burned out tonight, I've been working all afternoon, but I'll do some more testing after I've had some shut-eye.

Sometimes JT circuits need to be kicked into oscillation. You could try putting momentary-contact switches between base and emitter, and between base and collector. Punching the switch for a few microseconds or a millisecond might work. At least the real hardware often works like this, even with big JTs using 2n3055s.


ETA: Can you move your trigger point over to the right a bit? You have it at the leftmost edge of the screen, and this prevents you from seeing what happens in the "pretrigger" time. In most of the shots I've shown, my trigger is set horizontally at screen center.  Try dragging the triangular icon at the top left of the screen, over to the third or fourth horizontal division.

Dragging them has no effect because, unlike a real scope, moving those llines neither increments nor decrements anything.  Sort of worthless in that respect and they don't hide anything either.

WOW, I can't explain it but the kicking worked.  It increased the current it was giving by a LOT too.