.:madworm:.'s photos

That company is now gone. It went out of business recently. And they have burnt quite a lot of money. Can't compete with cheap solar cells from Asia. Irony of Fate. How long will it take until the race for cheap labor has moved around the globe? Find a cheap place, install a big tap to the big subsidies barrel and drain it. Then move on. Shareholder value payed for by everybody's taxes. Why not hand over the money right away? That would be such much easier. I remember one episode of Star Trek (TNG) which dealt with the infestation of the crew with strange "inter-phase" parasites. Data had weird hallucinations. Picard was plagued with nasty headaches and Dr. Crusher was observed inserting a straw into Picards head and having a refreshment. I think "we" are infested with parasites as well...

230mA output current. Very far from the rated 3A. I think I need to get or build some sort of dummy load to test this thing further. Big fat transistor, big fat heatsink, current sense resistor + opamp as constant current source. Mabe some 4mm banana binding posts to use my DMM as current meter.

230mA output current Once I have a working dummy load, I can test if these modules really withstand the advertised 3A continuous and 4A peak current.

CH1: inductor input, CH2: inductor output, MATH: CH1-CH2 Note that the "math scale" does NOT compensate for probe attenuation.

Removed the two 51k upper resistors of the feedback voltage divider. Now it can be tuned with an external 200k trimmer pot wired as a simple voltage divider between the output and GND. The wiper goes to the adjust pin (blue).

I removed an optional Zener diode on the output side and replaced it with a 10µF ceramic capacitor. This seems to be enough to get it stable, at least at light loads. If this is still the case at 3A is a different matter.

Current consumption in power-down mode is about 60µA.

Testing...

Modified to output 4.5V instead of the standard 3.3V. The most useful "manual" for this device is currently this one. Maybe I will add a blog post about it, which may be around for longer.

Be careful when removing the legs.

Got rid of most of the silicone rubber.

All legs gone

Popped the cap

Silly-cone thermal compound. Not terribly hard to remove, but it is annoying.

Missing legs