Panicked Board Population and Low Power Testing

Chrome was derping, and for some reason, the Blogger editor failed to work correctly. Fortunately, Firefox was more reliable. So here I am, sitting at my desk, abandoning my choice browser and updating this page after a day of restful and theraputic panicked board population.

After several hours, the board was finally populated - witness TraloCoil, in all of it's purple silkscreened glory!

Added masking tape to the right picture because of a rather nasty shock acquired from brushing sweaty fingers over exposed bus caps. Bus caps are dangerous. -_-

Anywhoo, I decided to use the oneTesla interrupter for low-power testing, as it's more reliable than the one I used, and it's low 10% duty cycle makes it less likely for any catastrophic errors to blow the transistors. Also, I just wanted to be as safe as possible.

First, after turning on the interrupter, a nice buzzing noise was heard from the GDT. Scoping the gate drivers...

Nice waveform!

Hmm. In retrospect, that workspace is surprisingly disgustingly disturbingly horribly messy.

Anywhoo, scoping the IGBTs themselves displayed a lovely looking startup pulse.

By this point, I was ready for low power testing. Plugging the secondary and primary into the board and connecting the whole shebang up to a DC power supply, I slowly upped the voltage.

The buzzing from the GDT inexplicably stopped.

This implies something is going wrong. Popular troubleshooting techniques dictate that the first thing to do should be to switch the two gate drives, as the drivers could very well be 180 degrees off from the actualy waveform.

After the switch, the buzzing came back, and lo and behold, first light!!!

REALLY faint, but nevertheless discernible.

Full power testing and audio modulation to come. Perhaps some use of my personal interrupter. :P

Happy days!

Now time to find a variac... .