Dilshan R Jayakody’s Web Log

In last year we spend a lot of time and effort to wire our new house by ourselves. To complete this job we took nearly 2 ½ months and it includes wiring, fixing electrical fittings, communication equipment, etc. In this post, we describe how we archive this task with some technical details. Due to a large number of electrical points, we decided to use 3 phase electrical wiring in our house. To make it simpler we divide entire house wiring into 3 isolated circuits with 3 separate distribution boards. High-level design of our AC wiring systems is illustrated in the below diagram. High-level electrical wiring diagram up to distribution boards In the above circuit, the 3 phase AC line is first fed into 4-pole 40A isolator . Then it connected to 4-pole RCCB with 3 separate indicator lights. We use indicator lights to see the status of each phase, easily at any time. After RCCB we fed each phase into 3 separate distribution boards. As seen in the diagram the first (phase) circui...

In this post, we describe the fan controller which we designed for our 9U wall mount server cabinet. This fan controller is designed to drive a 12V DC cooler fan with pre-configured intervals or by monitoring the temperature of the server cabinet. The final version of the fan controller with DC brushless fan and 12V - 60W PSU. Core components of this fan controller are CD4060 binary counter, LM35 temperature sensor, and LM358 operational amplifier. In this design, CD4060 has used as long duration timer and it can be configured to trigger cooler fan from 1-minute and up to 4-hour. In this design, an LM35 temperature sensor is used to activate cooler fan in specified temperature. This sensor stage is useful to drive cooler fan when timer stage is in an inactive state. To control the cooler fan we use AP9971 dual N-channel power MOSFET transistor. We design this system to drive 12V cooler fans up to 2A of current. To test this controller we use commonly available 120mm × 120mm...

This is an automatic Cat6 / Cat5 network cable tester designed using NE555 timer and 4017, decade counters. This unit test all 8 wire lines of twisted pair network cable and indicate pass/fail status with a single LED. We design this unit to test network connectivity issues in Cat6 / Cat5 cable systems and it is capable to check both crossover and straight-through type network cables. A prototype version of network cable tester. The recommended way to construct this circuit is on PCB. Both Master and Salve units need to be built on two separate boards. To perform test one end of the network cable must be connected to the Master unit and other ends need to be connected to the Slave unit. After connecting both Master and Slave units press " START-TEST " (S1) button to perform the test. Status of the cable is indicated through LED2 ( PASS indicator). PCB and schematic of this unit are available to download at google drive and easyeda.com .

Sony STR-AV780 is a combined receiver and audio/video control center. This receiver is manufactured by Sony in around 1986 and it is capable to deliver 2 × 80W audio output power with 8Ω speaker load. The STR-AV780 which I got had two problems. The first problem is in the power amplifier stage and it produces distortion in high frequencies. The second problem is in FM radio receiver and it is completely dead. The power amplifier of STR-AV780 is based on two Sanyo STK4042 XI AF power amplifier ICs. To fix the distortion issue we replace all the electrolytic capacitors in both STK4042 power amplifier boards. After replacing capacitors distortion issue got fixed and the power amplifier starts to produce a clear output waveform. The FM receiver of this AVR is mainly based on 2 ICs. For IF stage it uses LA1235, and to demodulate FM stereo signal it uses LA3401. Apart from that Sony CX7925 is used as PLL frequency synthesizer. The front end of FM tuner is based on a couple of transist...

This is simple, but very high-quality CXA1191S based FM radio receiver system. In this design, we use Sony CXA1191S as FM tuner and TDA2003 as an audio amplifier. This receiver system is designed to work with 12V DC power source and it delivers approximately 6W audio output power (with 4Ω speaker load). The core component of this receiver system is CXA1191 FM radio IC, and for this design, we use 30 pin version of CXA1191 (which is known as CXA1191S) because it's commonly available in electronic component shops (and in eBay ). Due to less availability of IF transformers we did not use any IF transformers in this design and only the FM section is used in the IC. (AM section of the IC is ignored due to unavailability of broadcasting stations in here in Sri Lanka ) A prototype version of CXA1191S FM radio receiver. Compare with most of the FM radio ICs this CXA1191S receiver offer very good selectivity and higher sensitivity. After adjusting (all inductors and trimmers) we w...

This project is an assembler compiler to generate a binary executable for 8-bit x86 like CPU systems. This compiler can parse NASM style assembler code and it compatibles with Marco Schweighauser's javascript 8-bit virtual CPU . Compare with Marco Schweighauser's javascript compiler this compiler parse almost same assembler code and generate almost identical executable code. The only difference in this parser is that all the operands are separated by white space(s), and not with the comma ( , ). jmp start hello: db "Hello World!" db 0 start: mov c hello mov d 232 call print hlt print: push a push b mov b 0 loop: mov a [c] mov [d] a inc c inc d cmp b [c] jnz loop pop b pop a ret The output generated by this compiler for " Hello World " sample is listed in below and it can execute directly with Marco Schweighauser's 8-bit virtual CPU . 0000 1F0F 4865 6C6C 6F20 576F 726C 6421 0006 0010 0202 0603 E838 1800 3200 320...

When comes to electronic designing and testing, adjustable current sources facilitates to simulate "load" on the circuit(s). The most common use of "constant current source" is to test the performance of power supply units and battery packs. The current source introduced in this article is capable to handle current up to 6A with a maximum input voltage of 50V. This is an operational amplifier based adjustable current source and it uses LM358 in a general voltage follower configuration. To handle large currents we use four 0.1Ω 20W resistors as "load resistor", and those load resistors are drive through pair of 55N06 N-channel MOSFET transistors. Final view of adjustable constant current source prototype. The power supply unit of this project is built around 9V × 2 (2A) step-down transformer and it is designed to get regulated 12V DC voltage. In our design, this 12V power source is used to drive LM358 Op-Amp and 12V cooling fan. In our PCB desig...