Fridays update!
I had a major setback. On Wed I setup the bench to resume work on the GDuP. I had some code changes I needed to test and I tried programming the first board. It died. 2nd board. It died. Third board. It died. Oooops. No more boards to try! Something is wrong here.
I had taken the rest of the boards and kitted them up to be hand soldered by the local assembly house and I was short on the GD IC and had no spares. That bummed me out and I vegitated the rest of Wed.
On Thurs I removed an IC from a GD board and surgically repaired one of the GDuP boards. I checked all my calculations and reviewed the datasheet(s). I then scoped the board and found I had a stability problem which I quickly corrected before frying another IC.
With that I spent all Thurs fighting other setup and configurations, but, by the late afternoon I had a stable setup and could debug or re-program the GDuP board. I got all the bugs ironed out and now the board calibrates with the new high current range. So, now I have low around 10mA, medium around 180mA and high at 750mA.
I also fixed the delay on startup to eliminate the flash and moved it to not encroach on the UI timing. There is a delay to turn on which is around 60mS and some of you will notice this delay. If the light was turned on any sooner it would come on with some very bright value and then settle in to the final value some time later.
There is one remaining task to code in. It appears I have an offset in the LED current that is read by the uP. I need to zero this offset in SW to get the servoed LED current to the proper value. The low should be 3mA, but, it's calibrating to 13mA or so. No biggie for now. I still love it.
Ended up going to bed last night around 1am and I turned on the light on low and left it running. I will check it again when I go to bed again tonight, but, I expect it to still be running.
I UPS redline more ICs and they just arrived. I'll fix and re-program the other two dead boards today or this weekend.
Since the LED control range is now ~1mA to ~1A+ I'm sure there will be different needs and different drive level requirements. I'd like to keep the derivatives to a minimum, but, we can start the discussion here or in another thread.
Depending on what light this goes into some may want low lower. Some may want a mizer version while others will want the turbo version.
I will have some LEs officially available potentially near the end of next week and I'm looking for some Beta testers who would like to put the LE through their testing using primary and rechargeable. All feedback good or bad will be used to iron out any issues that may come up.
After the Beta period I should be getting stock in 3-4 weeks and will start making them available first in whole lights (Aleph Mule, A19) and kits (heads , clickie) for those that want to upgrade from a standard LE with two stage twistie to a GDuP.
There will be a lockout period during the phase. No GDuP board will be available to modders until after the lockout phase.
I have not thought about the price on the board or anything else so if you ask you'll need plenty of
before you might get an answer because I'm still
.
Lastly, I re-ordered the anode boards and I just got shipment notification today and they should be here Monday. Once the anode boards arrive I'll be able to make more complete assemblies.
O, the LE I put together on Thursday I found one remaining anode board lying on the bench.
I won't let the cat out of the bag... In fact I'll leave it at that and you can speculate all you want.:nana: I'll just say it has nothing to do with Hammerhead.:devil:
Wayne
:wave:
