Category: Science

If you measure something often enough, it becomes science

Discrete LM3909 vs. DSO150 Scope

Although I’m a big fan of multi-channel scopes and Hall-effect current probes, a dirt-cheap single-trace oscilloscope can get you quite a ways to the goal:

LM3909 – DSO150 test setup

That’s a genuine JYETech DSO150 powered by an 18650 lithium cell and a boost converter set to 9 V. Make sure you get a genuine DSO150 from an authorized seller, rather than one of the myriad knockoffs; it doesn’t cost much more and tends to reward the right folks.

Anyhow, battery power means you can connect it directly across components to measure what would otherwise be a differential voltage:

LM3909 – Darl Q1 3x Q2 – 1.5 V – R1 V – DSO150

That’s the voltage across R1, the 39 Ω LED ballast resistor in the discrete LM3909 circuit running from a 1.5 V supply. Divide the 314 mV peak by 39 Ω to get 8 mA of LED current.

The voltage across C1, the timing and boost capacitor, looks like this:

LM3909 – Darl Q1 3x Q2 – 1.5 V – C1 V – DSO150

So the cap adds half a volt to the supply in order to put 2.0 V across the LED, which accounts for the relatively low current; the green LED has a forward drop of about 2.2 V at 20 mA and 1.9 V at µA-level current.

For completeness, the voltage across the LED:

LM3909 – Darl Q1 3x Q2 – 1.5 V – Green LED V – DSO150

So, yup, the LED really does see 2.0 V. I love it when the numbers work out.

Crank the supply to 3 V and see this across R1:

LM3909 – Darl Q1 3x Q2 – 3.2 V – R1 V – DSO150

The LED current is now 1.23 V / 39 Ω = 33 mA.

The capacitor just barely enters reverse charge:

LM3909 – Darl Q1 3x Q2 – 3.2 V – C1 V – DSO150

Pop quiz: what voltage to you expect to see across the LED?

I’ll leave further investigation to your imagination, but for low-frequency analog work, you can do worse than a DSO150.

2020-09-09
Monthly Science: Inchworms

A Rudbeckia Black-eyed-susan coneflower from the garden carried a passenger to our patio table:

Inchworm – linear

Even linearized, the inchworm was barely 20 mm long; it’s the thought that counts.

The stamens mature in concentric rings, each stamen topped by a pollen grain. Apparently, those grains are just about the most wonderful food ever, as the inchworm made its way around the ring eating each grain in succession:

Inchworm – feeding

Of course, what goes in must come out:

Inchworm – excreting

I had to brush off the table before washing it; the pellets are dry, but smear when you get them wet.

Another flower in the vase held a 10 mm inchworm with plenty of upside potential:

Inchworm – junior edition

After nearly a week, the flowers were done and the inchworms had moved on. We wish them well, although we likely won’t recognize them in the future.

2020-09-01

LTSpice Diode Models Sorted By Forward Voltage

LTSpice includes a bunch of LEDs I’ll never own, so finding a tabulation of their forward voltages helped match them against various LEDs on hand. The table was sorted by the forward voltage at the diode’s rated average current, which wasn’t helpful for my simple needs, so I re-sorted it on the Vf @ If = 20 mA column over on the right:

Part #       Mfg             Is         N      Iavg Vf@Iavg  Vd@If
QTLP690C     Fairchild    1.00E-22    1.500    0.16   1.90    1.82
PT-121-B     Luminous     4.35E-07    8.370   20.00   3.84    2.34
LUW-W5AP     OSRAM        6.57E-08    7.267    2.00   3.26    2.39
LXHL-BW02    Lumileds     4.50E-20    2.600    0.40   2.95    2.75
W5AP-LZMZ-5K Lumileds     3.50E-17    3.120    2.00   3.13    2.76
LXK2-PW14    Lumileds     3.50E-17    3.120    1.60   3.11    2.76
AOT-2015     AOT          5.96E-10    6.222    0.18   3.16    2.80
NSSW008CT-P  Nichia       2.30E-16    3.430    0.04   2.92    2.86
NSSWS108T    Nichia       1.13E-18    3.020    0.04   2.99    2.94
NSPW500BS    Nichia       2.70E-10    6.790    0.03   3.27    3.20
NSCW100      Nichia       1.69E-08    9.626    0.03   3.60    3.50

The currents come from plugging the various constants into the Schockley Diode Equation and turning the crank.

One could, of course, measure the constants for the diodes on hand to generate a proper Spice model, but that seems like a lot of work for what’s basically a blinking LED.

2020-08-28

Cheap LED Assortment: Forward Voltage

Starting with a box of cheap LEDs from halfway around the planet:

LED kit – case

Measuring the forward voltages didn’t take much effort:

5mm 3mm LED kit – Vf tests

The top array fed the LEDs from a bench power supply through a 470 Ω resistor, with the voltage adjusted to make the current come out right. The bottom array came from the Siglent SDM3045 multimeter’s diode test function, which goes up to 4 V while applying about 400 µA to the diode (the 20 µA header is wrong).

These numbers come into play when blinking an LED from a battery, because a battery voltage much below the Vf value won’t produce much light. It’s a happy coincidence that a single lithium cell can light a white or blue LED …

For comparison, the forward voltages from another batch of LEDs:

ROYGBUIW – LED Color vs Vf

Those all look a bit higher at 20 mA, but everything about the measurements is different, so who knows?

2020-08-26
Power Outage

Just before Tropical Storm Isaias rolled through, my hygrometer reached a new high:

Pre-Isaias humidity

The National Weather Service reported 99% at the airport a few miles away, so the meter’s calibration seems about right.

Shortly thereafter, the humidity dropped to the mid-70s as the wind picked up and, over the next few hours, falling branches took out vast swaths of Central Hudson’s electrical infrastructure. My little generator saved our refrigerator & freezer during 15 hours of outage; three days later, thousands of folks around us still have no power.

A confluence of other events, none nearly so dramatic, will throttle my posting over the next two weeks.

We’re OK and hope you’re OK, too …

2020-08-09
Monthly Science: Small Praying Mantis

These Praying Mantis nymphs may have emerged from the ootheca I rescued from the grass trimming operation earlier this year:

Praying Mantises in grass – 2020-07-24

The closest one was about 60 mm long, with plenty of growing ahead in the next few months:

Praying Mantis – 2020-07-24

A few days later, I spotted a smaller one, maybe 40 mm from eyes to cerci, hiding much deeper in the decorative grass clump. Given their overall ferocity, it was likely hiding from its larger sibs.

They have also been stilting their way across the window glass and screens in search of better hunting grounds. My affixing their oothecae to another bush may have disoriented them at first, but they definitely know where their next meal comes from!

Perhaps as a bonus, a Katydid appeared inside the garage, stuck to the side of a trash can that Came With The House™ long ago:

Katydid

I deported it outside, in hopes of increasing the world’s net happiness.

The stickers covering the can say “WPDH: A Decade of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, suggesting they date back to 1986, ten years after (Wikipedia tells me) WPDH switched from country to rock. Neither genre did much for me, so I never noticed.

2020-08-01
NPN RGB Astable Multivibrator Timing Adjustment

Back in the beginning of July, I replaced the NP-BX1 battery in the RGB Piranha astable multivibrator with a 18650 lithium cell and a USB charge controller, then watched it blink for the next two weeks on the first charge:

Astable – 10 11 12 uF tweak – 027

However, the blinks looked … odd and some poking around with a Tek current probe showed the red and blue astables had locked together, so they blinked in quick succession. Alas, I don’t have a scope shot to prove it.

I built all three astables with the same parts, figuring the normal tolerance of electrolytic caps would make the astables run at slightly different rates, which they did at first.

This being a prototype, I just soldered a 1 µF cap onto the blue channel’s existing 10 µF cap:

Astable – 11 uF cap – detail

You can barely make out the top of the additional 2.2 µF cap on the red channel, through the maze of components; now, they definitely have different periods.

Aaaand the scope shot to prove it:

Astable NPN – 10 11 12 uF tweak – 10 mA-div

The bottom trace shows the battery current at 10 mA/div. The first pulse, over on the left, has the red and blue LEDs firing in quick succession with some overlap, but they separate cleanly for their next pulses.

You don’t want to build a battery-powered astable from NPN transistors, because the 8 mA current between blinks is murderously high. In round numbers, each of the three LEDs blinks twice a second for 30 ms at 20 mA, so they average 3.6 mA, less than half the current required to keep the astables running between blinks. Over the course of 14 days, the circuit drew 11.6 mA × 336 hr = 3900 mA·h until the protection circuit shut it down.

The lead photo shows a harvested 18650 cell, but I started with a known-good Samsung 18650 cell rated at 2600 mA·h at a 0.2C = 520 mA rate to 2.75 V. It’s comforting to see more energy trickling out at a 0.005C rate!

I must conjure a holder with contacts for an 18650 cell, support for a trio of 2N7000 MOSFET astables, and some kind of weird spider with the RGB Piranha LED on the top. Even a harvested 18650 cell should last a couple of months with a much longer blink period (500 ms is much too fast), less LED current (this one is shatteringly bright), and a lower average current.

And, yeah, I’ve been misspelling “Piranha” for a while.

2020-07-29