Dr Ronald Stiffler SEC technology

[Slider2732]

I'm delighted about the boating thoughts, hoped you would go that route. The thing being that we all need a drive to do something like this, a reason that's practical and the boat is ideal. Well, unless you have a really long extension cord hanging out of the back of it.

I agree Nick, it's likely best to just order the 13.5MHz crystal. The thing being though that I have boxes and boxes of old electronics parts boards and felt sure that there would be tons of these things on everything. Sure enough there are the 2 pin types, hundreds of them, but not the 4 pin type.

The AD9850 will be here in 2 days !
The rotary encoder and screen will be longer but older projects might get scavenged for those in the meantime.


I tried the MX045 46.61512MHz crystal from the Soundblaster 16 card because the DEC crystals wouldn't come out and...whaddya know...it apparently runs at 1/3rd the speed that it should do !

[TinselKoala]

Those 4-pin things aren't "crystals" although they do contain a crystal. There is a lot more stuff in there.
I happen to have a handful of 1MHz 4pin oscillators so I sacrificed one for you.
The crystal itself didn't survive the decapping, but I would have removed it anyhow to show the chip underneath it.

You cannot simply drop one of these things into a crystal oscillator circuit and expect it to work! Or vice versa.

[Slider2732]

TK - thanks for that decapping. Sure enough, there's tons of stuff in there.
I had no idea of the spacings or sizes of such microsized componentry.


Got it !
The reason for the 1/3rd speed running is because of the LED in series on the Vcc !
The drop across it is enough to put the crystals into that mode.
By accident, I bypassed the LED while setting up a Slayer type tower and the scope now reads 27MHz.
Will try the 46MHz, but fully expect that to show the correct frequency now too.

Or another way of thinking about this, would be if you have a 40MHz crystal, an LED in series with a USB supply would produce 13.333MHz


Quick short vid of the discovery, wasn't sure what had happened until the camera shows the breadboard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPVfJ1-pXoE
(1min 16sec)

[gyulasun]

Hej Slider,
Data sheet I drew your attention includes the 5V  within 10% like a TTL circuit.

IT is good you found this out.
Gyula

[Lidmotor]

I tried that new 110v led bulb out is different ways and ended up driving it with a super simple bare bone Slayer Exciter and one 3.7v battery.  The led board did not light up at all using that 13.5 MHz 4 pin oscillator I have.  Sooooo ---I just kinda abandoned really replicating the Doc's signal generator experiments.  With what I have to work with and the results I have seen so far I don't see how he did what he did.  Driving that Cree board to the brightness he showed, with just a 13 MHz signal, is a puzzle.   
  Here is what I ended up with today which might end up being a nice light for my boat.  Long live the good ole Slayer Exciter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e54vSf0PcDg

---Lidmotor