Self accelerating reed switch magnet spinner.

[DreamThinkBuild]

Hi TinselKoala,

Very good build and interesting seeing the build progression. I learned a lot from watching your videos, thanks.

Hi MileHigh,

Nice work on the detector circuit design. Knowing where the magnet is, is half the battle.

There is a structured open source diagram program called Dia which might be useful.

http://dia-installer.de/index.html.en

If you click on the shapes tab on top there are libraries for electronic components. It also works on Ubuntu Linux if your trying to migrate away from Windozs 8 nightmare.

Another open source program is QCad (2D vector drawing with blocks).
http://www.qcad.org/en/

[MileHigh]

Tyson:

Thanks a lot and I am well on the way with the Dia program and will have the schematic posted tomorrow.  The program is quite intuitive and I just plunged into it and started making progress right away.  It's not going to be a perfectly clean schematic but it will be perfectly readable.  A simple and good object-based drawing program with various symbol libraries is indispensable.  The fact that it's free is fantastic.

MileHigh

[TinselKoala]

I've got an older version of Dia on my Ubuntu 11.10 system. It works fine but it doesn't have the complete, newer, electronic symbols. The mosfet symbols in the install I've got don't look like what I'm used to, they are some Euro standard I guess. I feel better sketching by hand, and I really get to understand the circuit when I sketch it out, make my errors, white-out stuff, etc.  I know it looks sloppy compared to a CAD diagram, but I don't need a computer to do it and it's there in my notebook whenever I need to see or alter it.

But here is a thing:

I would like to ask if someone can make a printed circuit template from the whole circuit.

I'd like to see a _single sided_ PCB template that could be sketched or transferred to the copper easily, at home, by anyone, either iron-on, from rubon transfer templates, or simply by hand. The board must have the TL082 (8-pin dip) for the basic control, and then for the strobes it needs 2 ea. 4017 chips (16 pin dip) and one 556 chip (14 pin dip), in a neat tight layout of course. A line of header pins for plug-on connection to the sense coil and the pot and switches and mosfet gate and source and the 12-volt power. If anyone is interested in taking on this project please let me know and I'll give you a definitive complete schematic sketch to transfer to your PCB CAD program.

[MileHigh]

Here we go, the actual circuit!!!  - Thanks Tyson!

[MileHigh]

I will do one more simple example to explain how to tweak the analog computer to work with a given supply voltage.

You need two multimeters to do the tweaking.  You need one to measure the DC current that you are going to manually put through the current sensing resistor and another to measure the DC output voltage.

Let's suppose that we are going to measure the power input of the pulse motor and the motor will be powered by a 12.6-volt battery.   We are going to assume that the battery voltage will be constant when it powers the motor.  Not that this circuit assumes a constant supply voltage so the power measurement would be less accurate if the battery is weak and dips in voltage as it powers the pulse motor.

Let's assume that you put 500 milliamperes of DC current through the multimeter and the current sensing resistor of the analog computer.  So the multimeter is in series with the current sensing resistor.  You can set the current to 500 milliamperes any way you want.  It doesn't even have to be 500 milliamperes, it can be close to 500 milliamperes.

So, if you have a 12.6-volt battery outputting 500 milliamperes of DC current that represents (12.6 x 0.5) = 6.3 watts.

Connect the second multimeter to the the output of the analog computer and set it on DC volts.

Adjust the 10-tun trimpot until you see 6.3 volts on the second multimeter.

That's it, the analog computer has now been calibrated to measure the power input of your pulse motor when it is powered by a 12.6-volt battery.

MileHigh