Eldarion and Bruce's build of Bob's Energy Converter

[Jdo300]

Hi Eldarion,

Nice board you have there! I am planning on learning to program both microcontrollers and FPGAs. Which do you think is best to start learning first?

God Bless,
Jason O

[eldarion]

Hi Eldarion,

Nice board you have there! I am planning on learning to program both microcontrollers and FPGAs. Which do you think is best to start learning first?

God Bless,
Jason O

Hmmm...that's a tough call.  In many respects, for this type of work (TPU controller), knowing how to program an FPGA would be more useful, in my opinion.  You could try reading through these excellent tutorials on Verilog: http://www.asic-world.com/verilog/veritut.html

The reason that an FPGA is better here is that you can design the logic circuits to work all in parallel, versus a standard microcontroller, which can only run tasks sequentially.  Sequential execution is very bad when you must generate signals with a resolution in the tens of nanoseconds!

Hope that helps,

Eldarion

[MarkSnoswell]

@Eldarion,
   OK -- I stand corrected. FPGA does look like an 'of the shelf' solution for a suitable controller. The Spartan 3 range looks perfect, although as you say a bit big. I presume that they have embedded versions once you have a design worked out?

I dont want to get into learning yet another programming system -- but if it's fairly easy for you then I'll look at going this way.

@Jason
   Wo -- you are so right about the relativistic effects and timing problems... more than you can know. Your calculations should be at the *very* low end of the scale when things get working well. I hadn't expected anyone to notice the relativistic differential problem just yet - excellent work!

Mark S.

[eldarion]

Well, I just finished design and construction of the $20 bias supply!  It provides 150-200V from a 13.8V source, depending on load.  Plus, it only draws about 5 watts!

I have rescaled the meter in the picture to read in volts x10.  As you probably have guessed by now, I am a bit crazy about metering and instrumentation--if something goes wrong, I want to know exactly where with a glance, not have to spend the next 30 minutes probing around with a multimeter...

Eldarion

[tao]

Well, I just finished design and construction of the $20 bias supply!  It provides 150-200V from a 13.8V source, depending on load.  Plus, it only draws about 5 watts!

I have rescaled the meter in the picture to read in volts x10.  As you probably have guessed by now, I am a bit crazy about metering and instrumentation--if something goes wrong, I want to know exactly where with a glance, not have to spend the next 30 minutes probing around with a multimeter...

Eldarion

Eldarion,

Nice work man, would you mind drawing up a little schematic for us of your bias supply?

Thanks