Guru
Joined: 21/06/2018
Location: AustraliaPosts: 1156
| Posted: 10:09am 06 Apr 2024 |
Long delay since my last update. Home/life/other duties pulled me away from the project for nearly two weeks, but hopefully a few straight days to finish it off now.
The new controller board that apart from myself, KeepIS and Dex have also built up and it appears to be working well. There have been a few minor tweaks in hardware and software but we are probably at the stage of being ready to order a quantity. I will wait though until the Variac is also ready to go then I will start the list of who wants what and how many. I think given the high freight costs I prefer to consolidate all into the one order.
The Manual startup, if anyone wants to use it that way is much simplified now.
The manual operation sequence is as follows.
1) Ensure the start/run switch is in the off position.
2) Press and hold the precharge button and note the input Vlow LED lights up.
3) When the Vlow LED goes off close the main contactor (and release the precharge button)
4) At your leisure, switch the inverter to Run
5) When the run LED has slowed to a 1Hz flash rate, you can close the AC breaker to the load.
step 5 only required if the automatic relay closure output is not wired in.
The two schematics for the auto and manual start up are below and have more detail (and the manual schematic is a little different to the previous one)
Manual Startup
WG39 Rev6 Manual Start.pdf
Auto Startup
WG39 Rev6 Auto Start.pdf
Poida is almost finished writing the inverter code and KeepIS is testing/tweaking & supporting Poida who will no doubt be very glad when this is all over. As these projects progress there have been some subtle changes to the original software and functionality of hardware.
The end result is exactly the same code for both and a simple operator interface that is wife friendly (sometimes a rarity...) - even the manual one (inverter) is easy to operate.
There are minimal changes to the BOM but both will be updated very soon.
Yesterday I received the dedicated Variac boards and I am currently building one up to put through its paces.