Claimed OU circuit of Rosemary Ainslie

[Rosemary Ainslie]

thanks cat.  It would be nice if you could post an updated link here.

[powercat]

Rosemary
TK will put information on the Internet when he's good and ready.
Provided nobody else has already posted it,  yes  I will post it for you and others
cat

[MileHigh]

Harvey:

How about a real-time power measurement for all of your induced oscillation modes?  A variation on .99's circuit for Luc.  Do you have a nice bench variable power supply?  Just connect it through a 20 Watt 10 ohm resistor to a big fat cap and a small cap in parallel and then use that node to power your setup.  (I am giving you a ball park guess for the resistor value, just something appropriate relative to your typical current consumption.)

Then as you tweak your setup you monitor the DC voltage drop across the big resistor and you can just raise or lower your variable power supply voltage to get a voltage drop across the power supply shunt resistor so that the big cap powers the circuit with your chosen voltage, 12 volts, 12.6 volts, etc.  You just need two meters on DC voltage measurement, one across the power supply output, and one across the big cap output.

If you choose the right big fat cap value, then every time you do a tweak it would take about 10 seconds to get to 99% of the final voltage.  You tweak the oscillations and see that the big cap voltage drops so you raise your power supply voltage so that everything stabilizes back to 12 volts on the big cap.

This gives you a real time power consumption for the circut as you try different oscillation modes.  You can derive the DC current and you are measuring the big cap voltage in real time.  A measly spreadsheet cell!  lol

On the Classical side:  From the battery's perspective the tweaks simply are changing the perceived impedance of this buzzing coil-resistor/MOSFET/555 buzzing beehive of switching activity.  How aggressively the buzzing is taking place and at what frequencies things are bouncing around in the beehive ultimately result in a change in the impedance of the beehive.  The real time current consumption/power consumption is telling you how bustling a beehive of activity you are dealing with.

Did that give you a buzz?  lol

I give all credit to Poynt99 for borrowing his design and modifying it into the ULPFBSRTRCPA  (Universal Low Pass Filter Based Super Real Time Reactive Circuit Power Analyzer).  We like to call it the "RTPA" ("ritt-pah") for short.  I pledge that this RTPA s officially declared Open Source and anybody can use it and modify it in anyway they want.



MileHigh

STOP THE PRESSES!!!!!

Revision 1.1  (It's about time you guys start talking like the "real engineers" talk. )

Ummm... I would put one multimeter measuring the big cap voltage and the other multimeter measuring the voltage drop across the resistor.  Chances are the you will get a more accurate voltage drop reading like this. 

[Hoppy]

Just an update on my Ainslie circuit testing. I have managed to get the 555 running hot with the mosfet running cool and the load resistor running quite hot as reported by Harvey. I can only do this with an NE type 555. Increasing the shunt resistor from 0.25R 1R helped to get into this 555 'hot' mode. The waveforms are very spiky with no sign of sinusoid's. Other 555's gave me a much less spiky and more sinusoidal waveform across the mosfet shunt resistor when the load resistor is running quite hot. The 555 circuit was powered from a seperate 12V battery as per the original Ainslie circuit.

The 555 gets very hot and is clearly working outside its recommended parameters here and therefore this mode of operation will not be easy to replicate, even if there was a point in so doing. The circuit is still pulling plenty of current from the battery in this mode and is no way OU, although I must admit, I did get confused at one point and think that it might be when I saw the battery volts climbing. However, this was because I had previously been in a heavy discharge condition and forgot this after I had readjusted the pot settings. Its all too easy to confuse oneself after an hour or so of tweaking all them pots!

My power calculations showed a total consumption of approx. 2.7W when running in this spiky mode. The equivalent power consumed in the same load resistor from a DC bench supply gave a very similar temperature.

EDIT: Varying the voltage on the 555 when powered from a variable bench supply, drastically alters the waveform shape across the mosfet shunt resistor. Best spiky signal was with 7.5V.

Hoppy

[MileHigh]

Two really cool links for the daring:

http://www.arduino.cc/

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?c=103

If you can write C code or assembler, and would love to start doing things under full digital control with analog and digital I/O, you could go nuts here and it is all so cheap to do.  Plus there are pre-written routines to do cool stuff.

If you are smart you will follow the links for the distributors, because it looks like there is a gold mine's worth of stuff out there for enthusiasts.

If I was 19 again I would go crazy with this stuff.

MileHigh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeScmRwzQho

We now take you back to your regularly scheduled programming...