This is a Remnant of The Past, the first project that started my journey on the road of electronics. The thing you see above is the first Tesla Coil I ever built, and the first project ever having to do with electronics. This project started sometime after I started my first year in high school, looking back it has already been 5 years since then. It all started when the younger me had watched Read More
Well all of you know that the Divergence Meter runs on Magic Smoke right? Well somehow today for some reason it has let it out…. After running for 3 months or so continuously on a plug-in Power Supply, I wanted to change the batteries and bring it outside for someone to see. And so I did. After leaving from a show and tell session in which it ran somewhat perfectly, the voltage regulator namely the TPS62160 5V DC-DC converter IC turned red hot and poof…..*insert poker face* well I don’t know the cause but all I know is that it broke and I have to fix it….or remake the main circuit board altogether. Thank god I designed it with a somewhat modular design or else I would have to replace the whole freaking thing =___=
On the bright side, I have a chance to video record the assembly of the the new board if I choose to remake it. But still *poker face x1000* -______________-
Well if you look closely you can see the molten blob of metal where it burned red hot 🙈 and wow I really didn’t notice the amount of flux still on the board :/ I’m pretty sure I washed it all off with alcohol and water after baking…well anyways I definitely can conclude this is the organizations doing….
El Psy Congroo,
waicool20
*Drum Rolls* *Cheers* YES it’s finally complete :’) THE DIVERGENCE METER IS COMPLETE !!! It took me a long time, it took me a lot of effort, it also caused me a lot of headaches but hey its complete!!!! Really awesome indeed, though I still have to tweak it a bit in the software, somehow release 0.1.0a of the software uses up a whopping 6KB out of 8KB of program space, I really hope to optimize the code and make the world line rolling much more visually accurate, otherwise it’s really awesome to look at especially at night 😀 the way nixie tubes display numbers gives that really special retro feeling yet it gives a futuristic feeling at the same time.
Now for some power consumption reports, well so far I’ve only had the thing on batteries with the longest duration of 2 hours but according to my estimations, measurements and fooling around(writing it down makes it science ;D ), I’ve found that it should run for around 4 hours on the lowest brightness settings and 11 hours on the highest. One thing I did though design in an “adaptive brightness” feature into the thing. Basically it uses an LDR (Light Dependent Resistor) and the device measures the environments brightness, when it’s dark it turns the display darker to save power and when it’s bright it turns up the display to make it easier to see.
All the circuit boards are finally assembled!!! And I only can say THEY WORK!!! 😀 Though of course there are some parts of the design which make me think about my design skills :/ well pictures first!
So exams are done and hell that was crazy, 2 weeks of painful mind torture XD anyways today the Nixie Board of the Divergence Meter is finally assembled >.< !!!!!
Here are some pics 😀
Here we have the front view, nothing really special. Though the female pin headers had to be filed down a bit so that it would fit the height constraints and that’s why they look like that, but the electrical contact and tightness is still great. I didn’t really clean the board before taking a photo so uhh….deal with it :p
