Projects Quick Update March 1st 2017

Quick Projects Update

Way too many projects and too lit­tle time. Luckily I had a few days off from work to make a bit of progress on sev­er­al exist­ing projects, and to start some new ones.

I designed a new Linear MOSFET board for the DC Load project. Now ver­sion 0.2 with dual MOSFETS and dual 0.5 ohm pow­er resis­tors. The orig­i­nal sin­gle MOSFET ver­sion did meet all the require­ments, but at high­er loads I was not able to trans­fer enough heat thru the sin­gle pack­age to the heatsink with­out exceed­ing my set­point for junc­tion tem­per­a­ture. I also com­pro­mised on the max­i­mum load spec­i­fi­ca­tions for the con­tin­u­ous duty cur­rent and volt­age. Also by chang­ing the max load spec­i­fi­ca­tion to 18 Volts at 10 Amps, I was able to increase the cur­rent sense resis­tor from 0.005 to 0.01 ohm which will improve the res­o­lu­tion at all cur­rent ranges.

Next step in the project is devel­op­ing a 4 wire PWM fan con­troller and heatsink tem­per­a­ture mon­i­tor­ing using the Teensy 3.2 board.

Progress on the Quad Voltage Reference ver­sion 2 tem­per­a­ture con­trolled envi­ron­ment for improved sta­bil­i­ty. I still need to fin­ish the pro­gram­ing of the ATTiny85 proces­sor and imple­ment­ing a PID control.

Quad Voltage Reference V 2 insu­la­tion for tem­per­a­ture con­trolled environment.

New series of projects for SDR (Software Defined Radio) recep­tion of ADS‑B air­craft, and AIS marine ship data recep­tion, along with some test boards for mount­ing volt­age ref­er­ence IC’s.