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rolling your own (an adventure in coil winding) part II

Posted 28th October 2011 at 08:13 AM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)

OK so I've been a bit slack getting to the second instalment. I actually finished the last coil about three weeks ago and have made the crossovers.

Tip number 1. Wear Gloves!! After the first coil my fingers were killing me. I'd pulled back the skin on my fingertips so hard that it was coming away from under the fingernails. Ouch!!! The gloves I subsequently wore were just normal rubber dish washing gloves. These worked quite well because they allowed me to put tension on the wire (holding the spool) and I no longer got sore fingers

Tip number 2. If you can make the same value with different size formers, choose the one with the lesser turns per layer. My pancake coils were much easier to make than the taller ones.

I think that the reason for tip 2 is that the more turns per layer, the more chance that small kinks in the winding wire will add up to enough to make it hard to get the last turn on for any particular layer. The coils...
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Old

Rolling Your Own (an adventure in coil winding) part I

Posted 24th September 2011 at 12:46 AM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 6th February 2013 at 12:09 PM by wintermute (add info about where I got the magnet wire.)

Wind my own coils, yeah why not, how hard could it be? Well if you are as much a perfectionist as I can sometimes be, pretty damn hard!!!

I suspect it would actually have been a whole lot easier if I'd not obsessed about getting a low DCR for my coils, and gone with a smaller gauge wire. As it turns out I was (obsessive), and decided to use 1.6mm (~14 AWG) wire.

I originally had thoughts of measuring off the length I needed, clamping one end in a vice and slowly turning the former (in my hands) until I wound it all on, luckily that Idea didn't last very long and I started to think about making a winding jig.

I hit google and saw some pretty fancy jigs, motorised with clutches, speed control, turn counters, that all looked too hard, so I thought about what I actually needed. Georges Transformer winding jig was in the back of my mind too, which gave some inspiration as well

The pictures below are what I came up with. I had...
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YARPS, finally some progress!

Posted 23rd April 2011 at 12:34 PM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 24th April 2011 at 12:43 AM by wintermute

So I have almost all of the parts (yeah I know) for my YARPS power supply. As part of the order I got myself a prototyping breadboard.

I've knocked up one half of the yarps power supply, ie the positive side, and hooked it up to my old model railroad transformer which has a 15V output.

Parts still to be ordered are the dual secondary 15V transformer and some 50K trim pots. However I had enough to make one side of the dual rail supply.

It didn't smoke, and the CRCRC part of the PS works very nicely Pics attached at the end.

I need to do a further test with BC560c's with different HFE's to see whether this affects the output voltage (my suspicion is that it will). I put a 36K resistor (which I had at hand) in place of the 50K pot and only got 8.6V even though spice said I should get 9.13V with that value resistor so something isn't working as per the sim, the use of a pot certainly seems to be required to get the desired voltage...
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Getting started again is harder than I imagined!

Posted 8th January 2011 at 01:09 PM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 18th January 2011 at 11:45 AM by wintermute (audigy now working reliably!)

It seems I have been doomed to not do any of my DIY projects since my main computers hard drive crashed followed shortly after by my laptops (the laptop has had another crash after that, and the drive is now on the way out again!!)

After having to pull the cables out of my chipamp last week and plug the TV into it (because the MythTV box refused to play a DVD and I can't plug the DV18 DVD player direct to the chipamp because it has no volume control) I decided I had better get off my backside and finish my pre/active crossover. I had to do it again tonight as well (plug the tv into the chipamp), sigh...

This is all because my playmaster had something in the pre die again and is only working on one channel and I just haven't been bothered fixing it. I thought that being inconvenienced might make me more likely to finish the other projects but it has been broken for about 6 months

So on Monday I decided that I should re-install Holm-Impulse...
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Yet Another Distraction...

Posted 31st August 2010 at 10:44 AM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)

Well I said no more excuses, and I for the most part started to make some progress. But good old Murphy stepped in and threw a spanner in the works.

The Boot Drive on my main computer decided to die on me, I've got backups of all the important stuff so no big deal other than the inconvenience. I could always use my work laptop... step in Murphy again, it too decided to die... once again have backups but all of a sudden nothing to run LT spice on, bring up my Plans, test data or anything.. I've got a loan one but I'm not going to set it up for a couple of weeks only.

So since my main computer was nearly 8 years old (single core Athlon 2000 which is really only 1667Mhz) I decided an upgrade was in order... This would probably have been a relatively modest machine if it weren't for my recent discovery of LTSpice and the knowledge that it takes a lot of cpu grunt, and that it benefits from multiple cores!!

So What have I been doing? Not working...
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No more excuses...

Posted 20th July 2010 at 12:25 PM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 22nd July 2010 at 01:00 PM by wintermute (addition of progress picture.)

I think I must be afraid of failure. I still haven't built the YARPS power-supply I've mostly worked out the layout on verro-board, and I still have a number of components (not least of which is a transformer) to purchase. You would think that the three months I've been waiting for the silmics I could have got the rest organised... sigh...

The Synergy active crossover, I haven't even started on the layout for the YARPS is a prerequisite for powering it up, but once again, nothing stopping me from doing other stuff.

Today finally received the 14, 1000 uF elna silmic II's today that I ordered months ago. I need two for the PS output and the other 12 are destined for the Synergy (yeah I know WTF?) the current schematic doesn't show them but in a case of gross overkill they will be used for separating different sections of the circuit if I can fit them Basically they will be decoupling the various sections from the supply (and each other). 1 cap per...
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Rating: 2 votes, 5.00 average.

Synergy "Active" Crossover

Posted 6th April 2010 at 12:38 PM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 5th January 2011 at 03:18 AM by wintermute (fixed a couple of typos, and added a small amount of clarification.)

Following on from YARPS I thought I would post the design I have been working on for my active crossover (which is in fact is what the YARPS power supply was designed to drive).

So here I present the Synergy "Active" Crossover. Please note I have only simmed it at this stage (and when I started I knew nothing about active filter design) so there is no guarantee it will work.

Why have I put "Active" in quotes? Because whilst this filter uses active components, for all intents and purposes it behaves like a passive filter. It basically emulates either an LC or a CL passive 2nd order filter.

Why the name Synergy? Well I though it was the best word to describe the differing technologies working together to give the end result

The design goal is to have an active crossover that for all intents and purposes is transparent. That is it does nothing other than split the frequencies at the desired crossover point....
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Old

YARPS (Yet another regulated power supply) updated 2012/01/02

Posted 18th March 2010 at 11:30 AM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 2nd January 2012 at 11:24 AM by wintermute (added formula as well as a few other minor edits)

10 Feb 2011. AndrewT pointed out something really dumb I had done (in a most polite way) in the original circuit. The caps in the filter section are in series and effectively halved in value. The circuit will behave much better simply by deleting half the caps. I've uploaded the latest version of the file. Sorry to the 125 people who have already downloaded, and I hope I didn't cause too much head scratching as to why I had done that, I'm not even sure myself, and I'm surprised I never realised. I'm going to revamp this blog entry as there are some things I have realised since I first posted, but that will be over the next couple of weeks. Hopefully I will finally build it soon.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time using LTSpice lately. The more I use it the more I like it! For someone like me who is somewhat challenged mathematically, and who's electronics theory knowledge level is well below where it should be (to be doing this sort of design anyway),...
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Finaly did some DIYing again

Posted 10th January 2010 at 10:26 AM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)

With the Silly season and general busier than normal work shedule (working a lot of weekend) I haven't made any progress on anything much at all lately.

Last week my Mother In Law put my 2 YO daughter in the bathroom basin. It was only attached with what looked like tile grout. It didn't hold... Today My Father in law assisted to glue it back in with some marine polyurethane adhesive/sealant . Hopefully it holds! This stuff was similar to the glue I had bought a while back to seal my 3 ways (see the leaks are stealing my bass blog entry) but hadn't got around to using yet. It seems perfect, it remains flexible, seals, sticks incredibly well apparently, and even claims to dampen sound and vibrations . As the tube was open, I pulled one of the Three ways out and basically sealed every interior joint. I then put a slight 45 degree chamfer on the back of the woofer cutout and glued in the front baffle (it has always only been screwed and didn't even have a gasket). ...
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Old

Construction of a P2P LM3886 gainclone part 2.

Posted 20th November 2009 at 03:44 AM by wintermute (Wintermutes Rantings)
Updated 25th November 2009 at 12:18 PM by wintermute (Added to category amplifiers)

edit: applogies to anyone viewing this at less than 1280 screen width... It formats properly with that (two images side by side) but I'm not going to go and redo all the images now!!! I already did twice....

OK Continuing on where Part 1 left off. The next step was to attach the Power Supply wiring. I will continue the numbering from the first blog entry for consistency.

18. Click the image to open in full size. 19. Click the image to open in full size.

images 18 and 19 show the completed amplifier with +ve -ve and zero volts wires connected. Note also that there is a separate zero volts return from the zobel capacitor to the star ground on the PS board. The red wire is the +ve the blue wire the -ve and the green wire is the zero volts. The return for the speakers is direct from the speaker output jack to the star point on the PS board. So in all there...
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