I am non technical but I have 8 wirsbo stats in my house. One of them is faulty and the unit is now obsolete. Is it possible to purchase one of these pcbs and use it to replace the one in the faulty stat ?
Thanks
Richard
Hello all,
I studied a little bit more this part of the circuit and it's a standard self oscillating flyback converter or a ringing choke converter as others call it. Indeed it provides the most compact solution for space constrained designs. But all of this comes at a cost: it's difficult to obtain a stable circuit and it has to be tuned by trial and error - at least this is what the literature says.
I'm not a switching power supplies expert here(even though I want to learn more about SMPS's in general but my time is limited for now) but I've come to a conclusion: it's difficult to tune this or to change the existing circuit to accommodate the mysensors circuits power requirements. I tried various combinations using sleep schemes and to change the flyback converter components as other mentioned in the mysensors forum and indeed I can power up my custom design that is presented in this thread BUT it's NOT STABLE. From time to time the switching transistor(mje13003) burns out and this is because I removed the resistor placed at the input of this power supply - near the bridge rectifier and replaced it with a wire(this is not the same resistor as @Lukaspp replaced from the base of the transistor which is the startup resistor for the flyback converter).
Now the only purpose that I imagine for this resistor is to suppress the transients - but it has a big value(100Kohm) which limits the current to a non-usable value for our purpose. I know that there are other solutions to overcome the transients but they are either bulky or too slow for this(correct me if I'm wrong here).
More than that let's not forget that we have 2 power supplies here and when the lights go on the first supply(flyback) input gets shorted by the relays contact(I have the relays variant btw not the one with triac) so I'm thinking that other transients appear here as the primary inductor doesn't like that as far as I know - so I assume the above mentioned resistor of 100Kohm comes into play here too. Another role for it would be to limit the inrush currents. I played with that value too but it needs to be very low to have something stable and I got a value around 200ohms but that doesn't help as it's too low and after some time the resistor burned up and saved my transistor :simple_smile: .
Now with all the tricks in the world and tuning the flyback converter to give more current this won't help as again let's not forget we have a SERIES circuit here so without external intervention we can't achieve that(only if we break somehow the laws of physics or maybe my thinking is limited :simple_smile: ). In this case the external capacitor placed across the light bulb comes into play to supply enough current to the standby circuit which is our flyback converter over here. I played with that one too and from 0,47uF I got to 4.7uF to have a decent result - but this one gets bulky and more expensive from obvious reasons. And let's not forget that the light bulb itself has some impact overall because this is the actual LOAD that we want to control and there are various light bulbs over there with various requirements. More than that they have their power supply embedded which in most of the cases is a(you guessed maybe): a self oscillating FLYBACK CONVERTER or similar. So this one too has inrush currents, transients which are sensed down the line to our dear Livolo switch and affects my custom board stability again :simple_smile: - isn't life beautiful? :simple_smile:
So far these are the results of my trials and none of them proved to be stable so I kinda gave up on this and will try to use a normal powering scheme somehow(as Sonoff switches with a battery powered touch switch on the wall). Not the best solution of all but this is what you get when the infrastructure wasn't thought for this scenarios from the beginning.
The Livolo guys thought of all of this I assume so that's why they stayed only with a simple circuit - a PIC mcu which maybe sleeps most of the time and a simple radio receiver which draws around 5mA or even less - so yeah that's why this works and it's stable in its original form.
The choice of MOSFET can be tricky. Seems that irlz44n was discontinued so you may need to find one adapted to the voltage and current you want to handle.
In all the cases you need to get a logic MOSFET too, meaning that they are fully open usually around 1 to 3V.
Also I'm sort of confused as it seems to me that L7812CV is a Voltage regulator, not a MOSFET. So if you are actually using that in the MOSFET spot it will definitively not work.
Especially if you are handling high current or voltage I would recommend using one from a reputable source for your MOSFET, I recently switched from mouser / digikey / aliexpress to mostly use http://www.arrow.com as you get free regular shipping, event if you order a couple of components (no affiliation to them whatsoever).
I'm wondering what the minimum input voltage is. The description only says max. 6.5V input voltage from the battery, but does not say what the minimum is. Both the nrf24l01+ as well as the atmega328P work with 3.3V, so if I use three AA batteries, that should be fine, right? I suppose using two AA batteries is not enough?
@dzungpham0703
I replied in the nrf51822 thread. Yes I managed to make it work like the original with BLE stack. And using the wonderful Cypress Proc BLE solution including capsense and lots of goodies . Cypress really rocks! I love them.
The current consumption was lowered to 200uA without being connected and 700uA connected. Those numbers include LEDs current consumption and other blocks like touch sensing.
I'll get back with more updates when it's finished.