I can’t remember the exact circuit so if I were repeating it today I would want to look at the signals on the scope as that DeTuning is going on and see what’s happening like maybe the direct output of the 555 would need to be buffered by a logic gate or something to keep it from having some sort of loading effect and to generate a fresh signal at full voltage swing because the 555 output doesn’t go all the way to the positive supply and things like that and maybe I would want to just put a current meter in series with the power supply and see if the current dramatically changes as this is happening to see if it really is related to that and maybe a battery is not the best option to power it if internal resistance changes the circuit behaviour when the load current changes and things like that.

I’m glad my content is helpful!

Thanks for watching!

I might try to see if I can use it with one of those ESP 32 based display boards like this one github.com/witnessmenow/ESP32-Cheap-Yellow-Display

yeah the light keeper pro can repair the shunt in the bulb sometimes and get it working again but then it’s a good idea to still go through and replace all of the ones that are not lit so that there’s no excess Power going to all of the ones that are lit. Every time another bulb blows and the rest stay lit, they all have to deal with more power and it shortens their life.

@ That’s good to know. Thanks!

I was literally out of time and I would have had to run different scenarios like considering which way the cable got plugged in on both sides, the pin and routing would change and some of them would be Open circuit even though there is no fault, so I could brute force four different test patterns and just say as long as one of them works then it is good but I was adding that test function right at the last second before I wanted to film and go straight into editing so I took the lazy way out

for current up to 2 A I would look into L298N and for some thing up to around 7 amps I would look into XY-160D

@@GadgetReboot the power supply states 300w 24v and 10amps.

that means the power supply is capable of up to 10 A but if the motor uses less, that’s all that gets used.

@@GadgetReboot Well, people are using the pwm controller like you showed in the video to help make a hydrogen torch into a machine for health purposes. The 150khz seems to be the ticket too. I have one that has a traditional pwm circuit for a motor. 21khz. I want to swap this out. The duty cycle is 50% for some uses and 100% for others. If you have other suggestions for a driver, I will look into that as well. Thanks for the reply

normally I like to put some sort of protection for offboard I/O even if it’s just a series resistor but I think I would only be able to do that if I went totally surface mount because the board is already at the maximum size for the flat rate pricing so I don’t think I could fit anything else. I wish the oled on this board was bigger but I figured as a last resort I could just use the fact that there are headers and I could just hook up an external display or use some wireless link to talk to another display.

@@GadgetReboot i bought some small displays which I've never found a use for. I'd need to stick them to my nose to be able to read them.

I keep forgetting to put that other color display I bought to use. it has an ESP module driving it. I wonder if I can put a wireless link to that display because I forget the size but it’s several inches diagonal

LEDs break too and this can fix them

If you want!

Those also fail for various reasons even if loose or corroded contacts that need to be tracked down

he would still probably end up with the lights tangled all around him like a nest and he would fall off the roof trying to reach too far from the ladder to probe the lights

as long as the spares come from a similar style where 50 are on at a time on a circuit within the strand, the voltages should match and for the bases I just take the bulb itself out of the base and swap it in so I keep the same base that was already on the broken strand and drop the good bulb in the base.

i’ve never used the DG parts, the ones I looked at seemed very expensive although they had better on resistance and higher voltage and better channel isolation specs. another one I’m looking at is TMUX4053 with slightly more supply voltage capability than CD and better channel isolation again and improved on resistance but it looks like a regular price as long as it’s a surface mount design. I don’t think it comes as through hole.

I just spent four dollars on a strand of 50 lights. Sometimes the string is too far gone And there’s more than one or two lights blown.

The easiest is to just throw the broken one away and not even replace it and then never have to deal with it again.

I was also trying to keep the same reference voltage on both sides of the switches in case there may be any clicks or pops when they are switching if voltages are drifting around on one side but it’s still experimental and more testing is being done. If I did only want to use one I would probably keep R5 and get rid of the one on the other side of the switch because R5 is a lower value resistor which I found worked better with that buffer. i’m still considering using a negative voltage generator for more headroom as well as keeping ground reference at 0V and making sure the switching frequency is out of the audio range of course.

@@GadgetReboot You don't have too, R5 is redundant and maybe a error, the voltage you put in the cd4053 is also coming out, they are fets in a certain configuration. you could place a double low pass filter after the negative voltage generation, just use a online calculator to cut off above 1 or 2 Hz, the cap will be large if you choose small resistors to allow current to pass.

@@GadgetReboot it's not necessary that the negative voltage is equal to the positive voltage. it works just fine if you use +9V and -8V (for example).

@@GadgetReboot I did a simulation with 2 low pass filters in series, using 180 Ohm and 820uF, the cutoff is 1.08 Hz and still have caps smaller than 1000uF, but if you draw 7.x milli amp, the voltage drops from 5V to 2.4V. Maybe it needs inductors.

@@GadgetReboot reading some more, LM2776 is made for audio (and to be operated from batteries if needed), 200 mA instead of 100 mA for the LT1054. no filters needed.

In this case it would be hard because the audio headers are both inputs and outputs on the same headers, but generally I draw left to right with the signal. I also wasn't sure how I felt about directly wiring everything, causing lines all over the place instead of just having net labels and a choose your own adventure signal path hunt.

@@GadgetReboot Don't get me started on the lots of boxes and net labels, KZbin university style of circuit design. Each track is a line and if there is more than one in the function like an address buss then you use a line defined as a bus. it makes the circuit so much easer to read and IMHO less likely to give you connectivity errors. Again just my opinion as an old design engineer. 🙂

when I was working in a fancy place where they did those group design reviews all the time and there were 5 to 10 designers all taking turns in different meetings going through their schematic for various boards in the whole system, all of the different artistic ways of doing schematics and resulting discussions would always happen. One person would pull up their schematic and it would be directly drawn individual wires all over the place, the next person would pull up a schematic where all of the circuit blocks are separated by dashed lines and there are net labels to get in and out of each section and things like that. and the oldest timer in the group would complain that all of the schematics should be drawn with the circuit blocks separated in dashed lines with net labels and have text saying what each little box function does and then a 10 minute debate would go on, nothing would change and on the next design review everyone would be back to doing it the way they want.

@@GadgetReboot We had it easy, we had design guides which you had to use. This ensured that all drawings looked the same. But as a engineer i had it easy, I just drew the circuit on A3 or A0 and put comments on how much current a track was expected to draw. These went in to the drawing office to be draw and given there final drawing number. They then came back to be checked and signed by the engineer before review and then signed off by quality. We had a quality system for going to have a pee 🙂

The signal flow is still primarily left to right, very normal, very easy to read ... instead of headers, GR could use TRS jacks (tip for input and ring for output) and some breakout cables. 👍

there’s also some amount of signal isolation bleed through when a switch is off for example if I put a 1 V sine wave in and have a switch disconnected I still might see 100 mV getting through on the scope but in this application it didn’t seem to interfere. Plus adding distortion may actually enhance the overall guitar sound!

@GadgetReboot it may or it may not. Without (or at least not a significant amount) we know it will be the same as the input.

mine does.

here is a video on that kzbin.info/www/bejne/nHOYoGB5hMmrl5Y

they can go bad as well especially if they are exterior and they end up with corroded leads in the sockets

Amazon is your friend. Amazon.ca: amzn.to/3HbGOeY Amazon.com: amzn.to/3F753rZ

The only problem is I’m still waiting on a couple of items and one of them that I just ordered is on the more expensive side so I don’t know if that’s going to be touched by the Postal Service. I tried doing research to see and nobody seems to have a clear answer on whether the Postal Service handles it at the import stage or if some other logistics company can bypass that so now I’m cringing.

@@GadgetReboot Can only hope, since I also have 3 sets of orders also. Guess I should watch the news occasionally.

knowing my work area, the next time I go to use it it will probably already have a reading on it from all of the dust that has settled.

it can go either way. When A bulb fails it usually fails by short circuiting itself so that one light goes out, passes on the power to the next, and then the rest stay on But then they all get exposed to more power so they will be more likely to blow sooner, one by one until the point where there’s just too much power and too few lights so the whole thing could end up with a bunch of blown bulbs that finally failed as an open circuit, not passing on power, and nothing is lit anymore. or it could legitimately just be one bulb that blew but instead of failing as a short circuit it might have failed as an open circuit like a blown fuse and caused everything else to go dark, but if you track down that one or two failed bulbs it can be fixed easily. when I am trying to track down the bulb if it seems like I keep finding dead ones and then replacing them and then it still won’t come on, after a couple of tries I assume maybe the whole thing had a catastrophic failure and it’s probably not worth the trouble at that point.