I guess it’s not too bad but had i planned better, the front would have looked a lot nicer.
I needed a new power supply because my old one acted up because of the inrush current of all my tube heaters. I built this one according to Frank Hughes’ webpage. It uses a negative regulator and npn power transistor to generate positive voltage. Interesting design
Sorry, have to call it out, but the grey wire passing over the mains switch is a major safety hazard!
I’m not a certified electrician but I’ve spent plenty of time poking around mains power SMPS psu’s and my advice is you general you want a minimum 3mm air gap between mains and low voltage circuits, ideally I prefer a much larger safety margin than that. My advise would be to find a new panel and lay it out so all the mains circuits are on one side of the transformer and the low voltage is on the other.
I have my fair share of janky builds but a mains power supply is not the place for it.
It looks a bit closer on the picture than it is in reality but i’ll be to reroute it. It wasn’t 100% finished anyway. The gap is probably a centimeter at least but it is no trouble at all to route it above the waay over spec power resistor.
I’ve had education on aircraft electronics and this by far isn’t my first mains power supply but it is bad design.
This. Only takes one close encounter if the mains electrical kind! I was lucky and it was very “light” (maybe I only hit the neutral terminal? IDK) but almost 20years wiser and it’s still not an experience I’d want to repeat.
I don’t want any of you folk to wake up on the other side of the room, or a hospital bed, or worse not at all.
You are all right. This picture was taken right after the first test, for those who spotted: the bare connections on the mains filter and switch are still bare, and safety earth was not connected yet.
It all made so much sense to me that i was going to fix those things after i added the negative supply, but i didn’t make that clear.
I realised i wasn’t setting a good example by posting a picture of unfinished mains wiring so i chose to remove the picture.
I’m not on the PC ATM, but hover over the footprint on the PCB, hit E, and try the 3d model settings. There you can adjust the offset and rotation for the 3d model. There’s also a way to do it globally but I can’t remember exactly how and don’t want to risk giving bad advice.
Probably you changed the origin on the footprint? Indeed, go into the footprints 3D settings and adjust the offset.
Generally, you want your ground fill to cover as much of the board area as possible. That’ll strengthen the ground connection, and also be less wasteful during the etching process. Those empty areas between the traces can be eliminated by moving the traces closer together.
If the offset is wrong in the library footprint you’ll want to fix it in the footprint library editor (the IC icon) rather than one footprint at a time on the PCB. Though if it’s a library you don’t have write access to, you’d have to create a new library, copy the footprint there, and then modify it.
And then you’re off down the slippery slope of custom footprint and symbol libraries…
This is ao_tht:Potentiometer_Bourns_3296W_Vertical by the way, though I’m not sure if this is an issue in your original library or if I somehow fatfingered mine (wouldn’t be the first time).
And I was going to tell you I’ve fixed it but… I just checked and it seems I haven’t. Well, I THOUGHT I did. Maybe I’m thinking of the screw_centered version, that one’s right…
Not as weird as it looks. The ribbon cable is attached where the caps were supposed to go. So the caps had to go somewhere else, and the pot footprints were right there. As for where the pots went, well, hang on.
Build progress has been virtually nil over the summer - but that’s okay. Getting geared up to get back at it. However, the garage electronics laboratory has been transformed into a brasserie, tommorow is brew day!
