User talk:RogerAF

Aloha from Honolulu, I have several areas of interest. I've been servicing recording studios here in honolulu, since the late '80s. Also concert sound, video projection, and theatrical lighting systems. I play electric rock-blues guitar and know what guitar players want from their Marshall amps. And I do recording engineering and production, so I know what recording engineers need from their monitor amps and speakers.

I have several projects I'm currently working on. And several ideas I want to develop ito new projects. I was thinking about some of those when I came across this site. It seems so serendipitous, I just had to join and write something.

I've spent the last week or so working on PC board layouts of several voltage regulator designs I've built and used over the years. I built a replacement for a recording console power supply regulator, that has been working now for near 10 years. I couldn't find the high current regulators that the original design used, so I used a pair of 723 ICs and external pass transistors and made my own substitute. The 723 has been bery bery goot to me! I used another pair of them to make a bench supply that adjusts from 12V to 35V plus and minus are individually adjustable and the pass devices have a 20A rating. I use this to experiment with various discrete op amp designs. A modern version of the Jensen 990 is my goal.

I've also recently built my first switchmode regulator based on TIs TL494 PWM controller IC. My experience with switching regulators is limited. I never had to repair one, only replace the complete unit, so I'm having to learn about them on my own. I've collected a lot of documentation and learned about buck, boost, buck-boost, fly-back etc. But it is all "book learning" as opposed to "hands on" at this point.

I thought these regulators might interest someone. I will post the schematics and artwork here eventually, but I need to find out more about how that is done. If anyone is interested, let me know.

Aloha, RAF

welcome

Aloha, RogerAF. Welcome to Open Circuits.

I hope you enjoy reading OpenCircuits and sharing your knowledge with us.

A few tips:

• You can "sign" your contributions by typing four tildes "~~~~" at the end.
• Be bold with your editing. If you add information that really belongs on some other page of this wiki (or on some other wiki entirely), or you accidentally delete some crucial stuff, it's fairly easy for anyone to fix it. Please feel free to revert or otherwise fix-up any of my edits that turn out to be erroneous and/or misguided.
• We are all volunteers here.

Thank you for sharing your experiences here. I also have a bunch of "book learning" about switching regulators.

Have you seen National's "simple switcher"? The web application is nice for taking specifications like "up to 3 A output current", input voltage, and output voltage, and rapidly converting it to a circuit that National guarantees will work -- rather than fiddling around with prototypes for a few days.

Have you seen The 3-transistor Black regulator? Or the +5v to +13v Converter also by Roman Black? It makes me wonder why I used to think switchmode regulators required a complicated IC to control them.

Should we start a page on switching regulators here at Open Circuits?

--DavidCary 00:35, 18 May 2007 (PDT)

---