A Colourful Autumn

The lovely colours of this autumn have been attributed to the wet and warm end to summer. It has certainly been very picturesque here in Hampshire.

Our regular customers and the three new ones who found us via the Web last year have been keeping us busy. For the latter group, we have designed a new variant of a circuit to enable solar panels to provide LED lighting. The redesign of an automotive DC to DC converter is going into production and we have delivered a prototype charger circuit for special rechargeable batteries.

Microphone Switch Unit

One of our regular customers needed a rugged and waterproof unit to remotely switch an array of microphones to a precision noise recorder to measure the effectiveness of motorway sound absorbing barriers.

Cable Movement Logger 

The company we share premises and synergy with was asked by one of their customers to provide a data logger to measure and store tide and wave induced movement of an underwater cable installation. One of their existing loggers nearly fitted the bill, but needed a new interface for a three-axis accelerometer and then a revised PCB layout. The interface included a 5Hz switched capacitor, low-pass, anti-alias filter for each axis.

DC to DC Converter

Our redesign of one of our new customer’s 12V to 24V converter products with 8A and 10A variants been successfully tested.

The converter is shown ready to slide into its custom extruded housing. The essential improvement required was to enable the boost converter to start up into an incandescent lamp load so that the converter can be sold to a wider customer base. Improvements were also made to aid testing of the individual component boards before final assembly, the power component layout was compacted to reduce EM emissions and the synchronous rectifier circuit was changed to boost efficiency and reduce component count.

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