Festive Smoke

It's only been a couple of weeks since the Seasonal festivities, but we're all back and raring (!) to go for the New Year.

We took the opportunity over the holiday period to have a slight change around in the office and lab. For those of you who haven't yet visited us, we work from a green field site 12 miles South East of Salisbury - a particularly pleasant working environment even if the country noises take some getting used to! Our main office is a converted barn. Our labs are quite farmhouse in style with stone slab floors which make an interesting counterpoint to the designs we test in there!

There are times when things can get a little hairy in the lab. One of our specialities is Power Supply design, and one of the things we like to do is test for mains transient survivability. Nick has designed and built a piece of test equipment that we use to "zap" our designs. This generates a high voltage to charge a bank of capacitors which are then discharged onto the PSU's mains input. It's usual to start off low and ramp the transient up to the maximum spec, but occasionally we have a customer who wants to see how far above spec our design functions. The most spectacular test we've done recently was to a test a Set Top box PSU to destruction. The PSU survived repeated transients up to a 6KV just needing the fuse replacing after each zap, but failed explosively (and very loudly) when we tried 6.5KV. We did, of course, have the covers on the unit for safety, but it was still loud enough to make everyone in the immediate area jump! One of the diodes had failed - and once we had this replaced the Power Supply functioned perfectly.

As the old expression goes...stand back and tune for maximum smoke......

by Ray

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MLE Creative Electronics

Festive Smoke