The Next Step

So it's been a rough 2nd semester of school. Thankfully, with college apps finally over, I can get back to work.

The project I've started on recently is the next step following the spark gap coil I constructed late last year. I'm going Solid State!

I've found a schematic for building a basic solid state coil on the internet, courtesy of Steve Ward. The name of this particular version is the MicroSSTC. A link to Ward's webpage and the schematic can be found below.

I had a few concerns about the schematic itself. The diodes on the full bridge rectifier seemed to be insufficient to handle the wall voltage, so I switched then out for more resilient MUR440RLs . Also, the schematic recommended using a TC4420 as a gate driver. However, due to the fact that I had the perfectly functional alternative of UCC37322's lying around, I decided to change that up in the schematic as well.

So the original schematic is:

All credit to Steve Ward.

I redrew the schematic with the edits in Eagle, and after some advice from a mentor, the final schematic turned out like this:

Which, when routed on the board in Eagle, turned out thus:

Hopefully, I will have this printed within a few days.