I finished the CRT power supply and got the CRT running with focus and grid:
As you can see we have an interference pattern. To the eye the beam looks much brighter in the center:
With the focus adjustment I can broaden the beam:
The CRT power supply:
My shop-mate Stuart is a master prototyper. He frequently uses Phoenix Contact DIN rail terminal blocks for wire-up.
Taking a page from his book, I got my own set of Phoenix Contact DIN rail terminal blocks (3044102):
Terminal blocks make for easy changes. The red bridge-bars create busses with as many connections as you need. You can easily probe any point in the circuit. Everything is bolted down to the chassis.
Connectors may seem like an insignificant part, but these will really help.
My shopmate had a TIG welder here the other day.
I took the opportunity to try welding the 3D printed metal parts I made last year:
These are intended to be coil holders, so I installed a 40 turn coil prior to welding.
Mike welding the halves together:
We used no filler rod on the theory that the infused bronze would melt and form a braze of sorts.
It worked very well:
The coil insulation didn’t survive: The coil is conductive to the casing.
I’m encouraged by the weldability. I am ordering more test parts to keep pushing this approach.
I am testting out viton gaskets for the vacuum chamber.
Viton gaskets are reusable replacements for single-use copper conflat gaskets.
The gaskets are rated down to 10e-8 torr, which is fine for now.
The smaller gaskets installed easily, but the large 8″ gaskets were impossible to install… they fell off the flange.
I called MDC and asked “what’s the trick?”
The trick is a little vacuum grease to retain the gasket!
I ordered APIEZON TYPE M vacuum grease from ebay, also rated down to 10e-8 torr.
I made 8 tiny dabs of vacuum grease:
And it worked!
After a few hours the chamber went as low as 5.5e-5 torr. Totally fine for now, but could be better.
I will continue to use them.
Reader jsults turned my on to g3data… it’s a little open source program that helps extract data from graphs.
It looks like this in action:
I tried it with my oscilloscope photographs and it worked OK. But it does not compensate for trapezoidal distortions.
If my camera were perfectly lined up with the oscilloscope g3data would work great.
This got me to thinking… maybe I could build a camera holder for the oscilloscope?
So I did.
I designed this mount using sketchup and had it printed at shapeways. It came in the mail today.
Works like a charm. Now all my oscilloscope photos will be perfectly centered and flat:
You can download at thingaverse or purchase at shapeways.
Today I made arduino control 30,000 volts.
My arduino has 3 channels of analog output 0 to 5 volt.
For testing I used this sin wave generator sketch:
int pwmPin = 9; // output pin supporting PWM
void setup(){
pinMode(pwmPin, OUTPUT); // sets the pin as output
}
void loop(){
float something = millis() / 1000.0;
int value = 127.5 + 127.5 * sin( something * 2.0 * PI );
analogWrite(pwmPin,value);
}
This generates a lazy 2 Hz sin wave.
But the output is not really analog, it’s pulse width modulation(PWM):
This tutorial shows how to smooth out PWM using a low pass filter. My low pass filter used 6kΩ resistor and 4.7 µF @ 45V capacitor.
Here we have the raw PWM output superimposed with the filtered output:
Looks good!
Now we just add the voltage doubling op-amp circuit I made previously, and BOOM:
This shows the source signal and the voltage doubled signal.
Sweet! Now we can control the 30,000 volt glassman power supply.
Here the arduino is sending a slow sin wave to the glassman’s voltage control:
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| From 2011-09-10 |
The Glassman’s slew rate is really slow without a load.
Here is the setup:
Today I tested the newly rewound polywell coils and thicker leads. Best shot was 2.36 kA.
Now we are in the right neighborhood.
Tonight I really experienced the power of the coil power supply. Whoa.
I’ve been working to increase the coil current from ~1.2kA to ~2.5kA.
Previously I discovered the coil discharge path had more DC resistance than expected.
I rewound the Polywell coils with 16 gauge wire (previously 18 gauge).
The 16 gauge DC resistance is 144 mΩ compared to 227 mΩ for 18 gauge wire.
I beefed up other wires on the coil discharge path (4 gauge):
Lets test the wiring with the dummy coil:
I took the power supply up to 100V… a small test charge…
When I fired, the noise from the coil made me flinch. It was never that loud before.
Lets turn up the power!
300V for second test.
When I fired the coil there was lightning! HOLY CRAP. Look what happened:
The coil fucking wrapped itself around the transformer (electromagnetic forming). Then it discharged to ground:
So I haven’t measured it yet, but I think we are getting more current to the coils.
My Glassman high voltage power supply can be controlled with a 0-10VDC signal.
But most computer interfaces (like the arduino ) output 0-5VDC.
So today I built my first OP-AMP circuit to double a DC voltage:
I found a LM358M operation amplifier laying around.
Now I have a 2X voltage doubler! Sweet:
Last week Raymond Rogers made a SPICE model of my coil circuit. Extremely helpful and awesome, thanks Ray!
SPICE is a general-purpose open source analog electronic circuit simulator.
I’ve been trying to get started with SPICE for a while now, but the steep learning curve prevented much progress. So to have a working example of a circuit I’m familiar with is so very useful.
Now we can run virtual experiment on the coil circuit and see how much current we get. Pretty damn cool!
Here are some example input values and resulting current graph:
Capacitance: 15 mF, 450V
Coil resistance: 180 mΩ
Coil inductance: 0.1mH
In this diagram the vertical axis is the voltage of a 1mΩ ammeter resistor, so 1V = 1KA.
I encourage anyone who knows splice to run this code, make changes and share results.
Also a shout out to jstults for his python script for inductance modeling.
THIS IS OPEN SOURCE SCIENCE.
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