The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Electronics Workbench

Electrical & Electronic gadgets

Simpleminded EPROM Programming Power Supply

My buddy Eks recently acquired a “guaranteed broke” Tektronix 492 spectrum analyzer that turned out to have a defunct memory board: the ROM holding the initial boot firmware has a bad checksum. He verified that by swapping in a memory board from another 492 and found it worked perfectly.

The original board used Mostek MK36400 8Kx8 masked ROMs, but they can be replaced by either 27HC641 or (in a pinch) a quartet of 2716 EPROMs. Being a stickler for authenticity, Eks picked up some 27HC641 chips. That means we need a device programmer, as none of the burners we have know anything about 27HC641s. There are other ways of getting the job done, but this has the advantage of getting me some face time with my role model for being a Renaissance Man.

Tek EPROM Power Supply Breadboard

To make a long story somewhat shorter, the 27HC641 is a 8Kx8 EPROM in a 24-pin package with the usual 12 address lines, 8 data lines, power, ground, and a single chip-select / output-enable / programming-voltage pin. Normal EPROMs in 28-pin packages have separate pins for all those functions to make life easier.

Anyhow, the CE/VPP supply must provide 30 mA at 12.5 V as well as the usual minuscule FET logic currents at 5 V and 0 V. The VCC supply must cough up a staggering 90 mA during normal operation at 5 V and 30 mA at 6 V during programming. Both supply voltages must switch between three levels: unnaturally high during programming, 5 V for normal operation, and 0 V for output-enable and during chip removal / installation in the programming socket.

This being an entirely one-off project, I used good old LM317T regulators with a handful of transistor switches to vary the voltage and clamp the output to ground. The CE/VPP supply looks like this:

Schematic of VPP-VCE pin supply

An Arduino will drive the gates of Q2 & Q3, with all the programming logic and timing handled by software. The shortest VPP pulse is a millisecond long, so that’s not a real restriction, and the verification can happen at nose-pickin’ speed. That simplifies a lot of other things about the project, too.

Switch: 12.5 to 5 V

Q3 selects the output voltage: gate high = 5 V, gate low = 12.5 V. The scope shot shows the gate driven with a 500-Hz square wave, which is about the right width for the programming pulse.

I prototyped this on a solderless breadboard (ptooie) as shown above with 5% resistors, so the actual voltages aren’t quite nominal. The readout says 13.28 and 5.3 V, which will need some trimming to get inside the EPROM’s 5% spec.

The 1 nF cap at the LM317 Adjust terminal encourages stablity by knocking off the high-frequency stuff and slowing down the transitions just a smidge. The datasheet suggests up to 10 µF, which turns the transitions into triangles.

The LM317 can only supply current to its load, so reducing the output voltage requires the load to draw current from C3. Because this is essentially a DC application, C3 can be quite small: there won’t be any other switching going on during the programming pulse. The datasheet recommends 1 – 10 µF, but definitely more than 5 nF.

The LED is actually a key part of the circuit, as it draws current to pull the output voltage downward: more LED current = faster transition time. However, higher C3 = slower transitions.

Fall time: 12.5 to 5 V

Seen at a higher magnification, the falling edge of the output waveform shows a decay that lasts 50 µs or so. The LED draws maybe 12 mA at 13 V, so the voltage across C3 should drop at

(1/100 nF) x (12 mA) = 120 V/ms

Applying a straightedge to the early part of that curve looks like 25 V in 100 µs; call it 250 V/ms, maybe a bit less.

What’s a factor of two among friends, particularly given the tolerances on ceramic caps?

T1 and Q1 (I don’t know why Eagle’s models use both T and Q as transistor prefixes, it’s probably an international thing) switch the output line between the LM317 and ground; I suspect just turning T1 off would work as well, but this way the chip pin is firmly held to 0 V, where it should be, regardless of leakage and other oddities.

Switch: 5 to 0 V

Because Q1 crops both sides of the transistion, the rise and fall happen in nanoseconds rather than microseconds.

So, now that I know this will actually work, I can build a PCB and write some firmware…

Memo to Self: make sure the code waits for the output transitions. Methinks delayMicroseconds() will be a constant companion.

2009-07-07
Cold & Fractured Solder Joints

Joint 1 – solder not bonded to lead

A friend brought over a broken toy (well, an Argent GPS tracker) with a peculiar problem: everything worked, but after a few minutes the front-panel LEDs would get intermittent. The LEDs are hand-soldered to the board with leads that extend maybe 7 mm from the surface.

After a bit of poking around, I stuck the gadget under the microscope, at which point the problems became obvious.

See that distinct line where the solder meniscus ends at the lead? Yup, that’s the teltale sign of a cold solder joint. The lead never got hot enough to bond properly with the solder, so the failure extends all the way down through the board. The only electrical contact is at a random point where the flux layer is thin enough to pass current; as the joint heats up, that point Goes Away.

Worse, do you see (click on the pix for bigger images) the small discontinuity about 1/3 of the way down the solder cone? My buddy Eks alerted me to that failure: that’s where the solder joint fractures from repeated heat stress.

Solder Thermal Stress

Here’s the quick sketch he drew on the canonical back-of-the-envelope. I added the red oval as a replacement for his emphatic gestures; with any luck, you’ll never forget it, either.

In this case the LED is anchored in a front-panel hole and the lead is mechanically locked to the board. As the lead heats & cools, it expands & contracts (duh) at a slightly different rate than the solder. After a while, the solder cracks; it’s much less ductile than copper.

Joint 2 – clear fracture

I’m not convinced that’s what happened here, as the LED leads have a bend in the middle that should relieve the stress, but it’s at exactly the spot where he sketched the failure he’s found in many, many gadgets. Power transistors standing above boards with their backs screwed to heatsinks seem particularly prone to this failure, as they have short leads stressed by the differential expansion between copper and aluminum.

Here’s another LED lead from the same gadget. A random out-of-focus fiber enters from the right and exits around to the left rear, but you can clearly see the bad joint at the top of the solder cone and the fracture line just below the fiber.

A touch of the soldering iron generally solves the problem, although you might want to suck the old solder out so the new solder can re-flux the joint.

Arduino Pro USB (cold) Solder Pads

This doesn’t happen only to hand-soldered joints. The USB header fell right off an Arduino Pro board while I was debugging something else. I had to re-heat the joints and the header separately, add flux, and then solder ’em together. Notice the bubbles in the solder layer? That header just never got up to the proper temperature. The current version of that board uses a through-hole header, which is more rugged than this surface-mount equivalent.

TinyTrak3 cold-solder joints

And a TinyTrak3+ board had few cold joints, too, where the leads just didn’t bond at all.

In both of those cases, the vendors did a quick check and didn’t find similar problems with their stock, so the boards I got seem like random failures on the soldering line.

Now, if I’d never made a cold solder joint in my life, I’d be in a position to get all snooty. That’s just not the case: it happens to everybody, once in a while, and you just learn to live with it.

2009-07-03
Plug Alignment for ICOM IC-Z1A Radio

Plugs and jack alignment plates

As I mentioned there, I originally connected my bicycle-mobile amateur radio gadget to the ICOM IC-Z1A radio using separate mic and speaker plugs. That seemed like a good idea, but bicycles vibrate a lot and the plugs apply enough leverage to the jacks inside the radio to pry them right off the PCB. That requires a protracted repair session that I never wanted to do again.

The solution is to mount both plugs rigidly on the radio so that they simply can’t move. I dithered for a while and finally decided that function trumps good looks on this project, particularly given that our radios spend their entire lives inside a bag behind the bike seats.

The top picture shows the small aluminum plates I made to align the plugs to the HT jacks, along with a plastic gluing fixture to hold the plugs parallel while the epoxy cures. If you just jam the plugs into the radio without an alignment fixture, you will glue the plugs together in such a way that they cannot be removed: the radio does not hold the shafts exactly parallel!

Plug stabilization – What Not To Do

How do I know? Well, I tried doing exactly that by simply epoxying the existing plugs into place, applying enough epoxy putty to stabilize the plugs against the radio. Looks reasonable, but when it came time to take them out (and you will want to take them out, trust me) they are firmly and permanently embedded. I had to carve them apart to get them out.

The mic, speaker, and coaxial power jacks are 10 mm on center. The 2.5 mm mic plug has a small shoulder that required a matching recess in the plate, while the 3.5 mm speaker plug is basically a cylinder. I don’t use the coaxial power jack, having hacked an alkaline battery pack with Anderson Powerpoles. The plate’s external contour matches the flat area atop the radio around the jacks.

You could lay out and drill close-enough holes by hand, use a step drill to make the shoulder recess, and then let the epoxy do the final alignment. However, you want the center-to-center distance exactly spot-on correct, as the plugs won’t mate properly otherwise. I turned it into a CNC project for my Sherline mill, of course, but that’s just because I have one.

HT Plugs in gluing fixture

This picture shows two plugs epoxied into the plate. While the epoxy cures, the plate rests atop the fixture with the two plugs vertical and their shell flanges flush against it. I applied the epoxy with a toothpick and worked it into the gap between the threads and the plate.

The end result will be a pair of plugs that exactly match the radio’s jacks in a plate that sits firmly atop the radio’s case. You should find that the plugs snap firmly into place and the entire assembly is absolutely rigid.

Caveat: don’t use an aluminum plate if your radio depends on separate electrical connections for the mic and speaker plug shells. The IC-Z1A has isolated shells, but remains happy when they’re connected. My Kenwood TH-F6A HT uses the shells for entirely different functions and will not work with them shorted together.

With the epoxy cured, wire the connections as usual. I had a small cable with enough tiny wires to put the mic conductors in their own shielded pair, but that’s likely overkill.

Finished plugs with epoxy blob

You could machine a nice enclosure, but I simply molded an epoxy putty turd around the connections, shells, and cable. The trick is to wait until it’s nearly cured, plug it into the radio, then shave off whatever gets in the way of the knobs, antenna plug, and other appurtenances.

It may not look elegant, but it works great!

2009-06-27
Bicycle Mobile Mic Amp Debug: It’s the Connector

The radio on Mary’s bike has been misbehaving over the last few months: the PTT button on the handlebars occasionally had no effect. Debugging this sort of intermittent problem is quite difficult, as it would sometimes fail and repair itself before we could get stopped in a safe place where I could poke around in the wiring.

After months of this nonsense, I narrowed the failure down to the short cable from the HT’s mic jack to the interface board: by positioning the cable just so, the radio would work fine for days or weeks at a time. I taped the thing in position and all was well, at least for a few days or weeks at a time.

HT audio interface – 2001

HT audio interface – 2009

These two pictures show what the interface looked like back in 2001 when I put it together (modified from another version I did in 1997!) and what it looks like today. The most significant change is in the plugs connecting the whole affair to the HT: a CNC-machined plate holds them perfectly parallel at the proper spacing and an epoxy-putty turd fuses them into a rigid mass. More on that sub-project tomorrow…

Loose plugs, it turns out, vibrate the HT’s jacks right off the circuit board in short order and those jacks are a major pain to replace. Ask me how I know…

The wire break seemed to be precisely where the mic cable exits the epoxy turd. You’d expect a fatigue fracture to occur at that spot, so I wasn’t particularly surprised, although I was amazed that the thing hadn’t failed completely over the months I spend fiddling with it. I finally resolved to fix this once and for all, which meant either flaying the cable and patching the wire in situ or rebuilding the whole connector assembly. Either choice requires enough fiddly work to discourage even me.

Sooo, disconnect everything & haul it to the Basement Laboratory, Electronics Workbench Division…

Before cutting into the cable, I measured the mic voltage on the PCB and tried to make the thing fail on the bench. The HT (an ancient ICOM IC-Z1A) normally presents 3.5 V DC on the mic wire and the external PTT switch pulls it to ground through a 22 kΩ (or 33 kΩ or thereabouts) resistor. The mic audio is a small AC signal riding a volt or so of DC bias with the PTT active.

The wire measured maybe 0.25 volts and the PTT dragged it flat dead to ground. Yup, through that honkin’ big resistor. Well, maybe the last conductor in that mic wire had finally broken, right there on the bench?

Measured from the 2.5 mm plug tip conductor (tip = mic, ring = 3.5 V DC, sleeve = mic common) to the PCB pad on the PC, the mic wire stubbornly read 0.0 Ω, regardless of any wiggling & jiggling I applied to the cable. But no voltage got through from the radio to the board…

Sticking a bare 2.5 mm plug into the HT mic jack produced a steady 3.5 V on the tip lug. Reinstalling my epoxy-turd plug assembly produced either 0.25 or 3.5 V, depending on whether I twisted the thing this way or that way.

Ah-ha! Gotcha!

Pulled out my lifetime supply of Caig DeoxIT Red, applied a minute drop to the end of the mic plug, rammed it home & yanked it out several times, wiped off the residue, and the PTT now works perfectly. Did the same thing to the adjacent speaker plug, just on general principles, and I suspect that’ll be all good, too.

Diagnosis: oxidation or accumulated crud on the mic jack inside the radio.

Now, to try it out on the bike and see how long this fix lasts. Anything will work fine on the bench, but very few things survive for long on a bicycle.

Memo to Self: It’s always the connectors. Unless it’s the wires.

Here’s the schematic, just in case you’re wondering. I wouldn’t do it this way today, but that’s because I’ve learned a bit over the last decade or so…

[Update: A more recent attempt is there.]

IC-Z1A Mic Amp Schematic

2009-06-26
Phone Charger: PowerPole-to-USB Adapter

I have a Virgin Mobile Kyocera Marbl phone, for reasons discussed there. It’s sufficiently nonstandard that the “fits most phones” headsets and chargers don’t. In particular, I have yet to see a charger with the proper adapter dingus for this phone.

Fortunately, the charger is rated at 5 V @ 350 mA… that’s easy enough.

Phone charger with Powerpoles

Cut the charger’s cable in the middle, more or less, and install Anderson Powerpole connectors. The standard color code for 5 V is white / black; don’t use red / black for fear you’ll eventually plug it into a 12 V source and toast the phone.

The charger wires are most likely a far smaller gauge than the 15 A (!) connector pins prefer, so strip the conductors twice as long, double the ’em over and perhaps add a short length of multistrand hookup wire to fill out the barrel before you crimp it.

Check the polarity before you poke the pins in the housings: you want the +5 V pin in the white housing!

I aligned the housings to match the ARES / RACES standard, as described there, as that’s what I’ve done with all my other Powerpole connectors. If your phone expects some weird-ass voltage, maybe you want to make certain it can’t possibly mate with anything that’ll kill it stone cold dead. Oh, and in that case pick a suitably different color. Blue seems to be the standard for 9 V, at least in the ham radio arena, for whatever that’s worth.

Add heatshrink tubing for strain relief (it might slip over the finished pins if you forget), wrap cold-vulcanizing rubber tape around the whole connector for more strain relief, and you’re done. It’ll make your charger cable resemble an anaconda eating a pig, but that’s OK with me.

USB charger to phone cable

Now the phone can commune with a bench power supply, a bulk 5 V supply, or nearly anything that you’ve hacked into using Powerpoles. It’s your job to make sure the voltage matches up!

Now, if you haven’t already, make a USB-to-Powerpole adapter. Alas, even though the phone uses 5 V, it draws too much current to charge directly from a standard USB port. However, I have a Black & Decker Pocket Power battery pack with a regulated USB outlet that can allegedly supply 250 mA and seems to handle the phone just fine.

So: cut a spare USB cable, verify that the red conductor is 5 V and the black is common (hell hath no fury like that of an unjustified assumption and we’re dealing with bottom-dollar suppliers here), crimp, align housings, add strain relief, and try it out.

This should work for any phone with a dumb, bulk-power charger. If you cut the cable and find three conductors, solder that devil back together again; there’s no telling what’s passing along that third rail!

2009-06-15
Tone Encoding/Squelch vs. APRS Packet Reception Reliability

We’ve been using ham radios on our bikes for years, but last year I put together an interface that connects a TinyTrak3+ GPS encoder to the helmet mic amp. This year I’m building two more, about which I’ll write later.

The problem is that listening to APRS data bursts isn’t all that pleasant, although it’s bearable, but it’ll get much worse when we use 144.39 MHz as our intercom frequency so we can both talk and be tracked: we’d hear all the APRS traffic within digipeater range.

Now, admittedly, talking on 144.39 isn’t standard. The local APRS wizards have given tentative approval, as we can’t figure out a better way to talk, give position reports, and not carry two radio / battery / antenna / electronics packages on each bike. As long as we don’t do a lot of yakking, we shouldn’t interfere with the digital traffic very much… and we don’t do a lot of talking while riding.

So I figured I’d send a 100 Hz tone under the audio and enable tone squelch, so we wouldn’t hear packets from anybody else. We’d still hear each other blatting away, but if I set the TT3+ encoders to send a position report every 10 minutes, it ought to be bearable.

The catch with this is that some receivers / APRS decoders can’t handle subaudible tones. I considered Digital Coded Squelch, but one of our radios doesn’t include that feature, alas.

To get some idea of how tone would work with the APRS setup around here (which is where we do most of our riding), I set up an HT on the bench with the TT3+ and my interface. The antenna is an HF/VHF discone, indoors, on the basement floor, beside a window. The GPS receiver can see a slice of sky from its perch just outside the basement window under an awning. That’s about as terrible a setup as we have on our bikes: low power, bad antenna, obscured line-of-sight.

Each test ran 10-14 hours, the TT3+ sent a packet every 5 minutes, and I checked the raw packet results on aprs.fi.

With tone off and the TT3+ waiting for 3 seconds of audio silence before transmitting, 39% of the packets got through to the APRS-IS backbone.

With tone on and, thus, the TT3+ unable to hear / avoid other traffic, 47% of the packets got through on one test and 42% on another. The higher rate was overnight, when (I think) there’s less traffic on 144.39.

Putting the gadgetry back on the bike, parking it beside the garage, and letting it run for 5 hours on a Saturday afternoon showed that 81% of the packets made it to the backbone. Some of the packets were received by stations over 30 miles away, which probably coincided with the the closer receivers hearing transmitters hidden from the more distant ones.

The only conclusion I can come to is that tone squelch isn’t going to hurt anything around here, where the APRS wizards have done a great job of getting the decoders to cope with subaudible tones. How it’ll work elsewhere is up for grabs, but we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

And it turns out that the radios take about half a second to wake up and activate the audio output with tone squelch enabled, so we don’t actually hear the data bursts: they’re almost always finished and we may hear dead air for a fraction of a second. Because the TT3+ can’t do collision avoidance, we sometimes hear other packets from other transmitters before the squelch closes again, but it’s not objectionable. Whew!

Update: with the TT3+ set to transmit every 3 minutes, it works fine!

2009-06-10
Byonics TinyTrak3+ GPS Power Control

GPS power from MOSFET relay

The Byonics TinyTrak3+ GPS encoder has a “Power Control” output that can switch the power to a radio or GPS interface. J6 provides the interface: pin 1 = common, pin 2 = high active.

With the “Power Switch” option enabled in the config program, you can set the number of seconds to allow the GPS unit to get up to speed before the next scheduled transmission.

I glued a surface-mount MOSFET relay to the back of the PCB with urethane adhesive; it fits neatly between the DIP microcontroller’s pins with one output lead soldered to the 5V pad of J7. The other lead goes to the center +V pad; because the relay uses back-to-back MOSFETs, the polarity doesn’t matter.

That replaces the normal solder bridge across J7 that provides power (on pin 4) to the GPS2 plugged into the DB9 connector. When the relay’s on, it connects the GPS to the power supply. When it’s off, the GPS goes dark.

The relay input is an LED with a forward drop of 1.3 V max and requires 4 mA to turn on: figure 3.7 V / 4 mA = 925 Ω max. I kludged an 890 Ω resistor by paralleling (stacking!) 1.5 k and 2.2 k resistors; you could probably use anything near that and it’d work fine.

The relay is an OMRON G3VM-21GR1, part number A11171 from Electronics Goldmine, but I suspect any teeny little solid-state relay would work. The max on resistance is about 1 Ω and the receiver draws about 65 mA. I measured about 20 mV of drop, so the actual resistance is a lot lower than the spec.

I initially set the power-on delay to 10 seconds, which seemed to be OK: the GPS (green) LED would blink a few times, then go solid. Alas, the warm-start spec for the Byonics GPS2 (see the GPS3 for details) receiver is really 38 seconds, average, and it was definitely producing bogus position data. So I set the delay to 60 seconds and we’ll see how that works; early reports indicate the coordinates still have plenty of jitter.

[Update: 60 seconds is iffy. 90 seconds seems to work pretty well. A bit of rummaging says that the satellites broadcast their ephemeris data every 30 seconds, so 90 seconds allows for two complete update cycles. Maybe 100 seconds would be even better. Some old background info for Garmin hand-held receivers is there.]

It’s obviously a tradeoff between accuracy and battery life. This is for use on a bicycle and, believe me, I don’t want to tote a huge battery!

If the control signal was low-active, then you could use a cheap PNP transistor as a high-side power switch.

The white/orange wire routes regulated 5 V through an otherwise unused pin to the homebrew interface that combines the GPS data with helmet mic audio. The tiny rectangle is a 1 µF cap that helps cut down digital noise. There’s no need for a connector on that end, as it’s wired directly to the interface circuit board inside a small enclosure.

2009-06-08