It has been a bit quieter than usual on this blog recently. It isn’t that we haven’t been up to much. Quite the contrary, it has been very busy. But much of the business (busy-ness) has been either at work. And the land work has mostly just been putting finishing touches on projects that have…
New experimental LED lighting
I blogged about receiving these new LEDs off of eBay a few weeks ago: but it took a few weeks to set up a real test in the house. We attached these LEDs to flat aluminum heat sinks, and I finally got around to testing it on Monday by swinging by the new house after…
Pond circulation pump has been on nonstop for almost a month
Pond circulation pump has been on nonstop for almost a month, and it is still going strong. 🙂 After fixing the problems with the pump motor controller circuit, we left the motor on 24 hours per day and 7 days per week running off of only the 2 solar panels next to it. I am…
Very high power warm white LED
We’ve been exploring different options for DC 24V lighting in the house using solar panels to charge a set of 4x 6V lead acid golf cart batteries. Our previous LED light tests worked but the light was a cool white which I’ve never liked for home lighting. Also, the previous test used 0.5W LEDs which…
Solar powered circulation pump update
On December 23, I was quite happy that the new prototype pump controller circuit didn’t blow out in the 30 seconds or so that it took to burn out before I worked out a solution to the voltage spike issue. From that point, I left the pump running 24 hours a day until today, and…
First real solar powered pump test
Today I ran the solar powered pump the entire day for the first time. I am very pleased with the results. Ever since I solved the voltage spike issues we’ve been having with all of our power electronics circuits over the years, I’ve been very excited to actually try out the new pump controller circuit…
Power switching problem solved! It only took me about 5 years.
In order to solve the long time problems plaguing my attempts at creating fast switching high power electronics circuits, I’ve decided to take a crack at simulating it using ngspice. Here is a view of the kinds of ringing I am getting whenever the FET opens at load: The very large spike (too large to…
First attempts at modelling a FET in ngspice
In this post, I will show some simple experiments I ran to adjust the built in FET component of ngspice to model a particular FET. This follows up on this previous post where I showed how to install ngspice and run some preliminary experiments to model a zener diode’s behavior in a circuit. The FET…
Using ngspice to simulate a zener diode
In this post, I will demonstrate one of my earliest experiments in using SPICE for simulating a zener diode. In my previous post, I talked about my history with power electronics and how I am beginning to use circuit simulation to get a better handle on what is going on. First off, I am using…
My evolving struggle with power electronics (technical)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Toronto_Propane_Explosion.jpg This post is a bit technical, but it summarizes my (mostly failed) experiences with power electronics over the past 5-10 years and my recent progress towards getting power electronics into our knowledge base. I’ve been generally interested in electronics since I was a child, and more specifically interested in it since I met my…
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