New to the board and just wanted to give my experience with pwmpower.
Ordered the Dave Lawton PWM on July 16th and per their web site would ship in a couple of days. After several attempts to contact them I finally got through and they said they were behind due to three of the builders were off with the flu for several days and said the unit would ship out by Aug. 5th or 6th. Still no unit on the 12th so I e-mailed them through Google and asked if I should get my money back through my credit card company and have them put on the black list. Still no reply. Called again on the 13th and they said it would ship the next day and I actually received a ship notice through Google that same day. Will be here tomorrow so I will let you know how it works.
Built a smack cell with a few mods and have been running it with a battery charger for around 12 hours on and off as the heat builds I shut it down (2-3 hours on about 10amps. Hope the PWM helps with the heat so I don't have to run it with a cooling device.
Update: Got the box today from pwmpower.com... I now have all the components to make the PWM. However, they still didn't send me any sort of instructions on how to put this thing together. The D14.pdf that they sent in the first shipment describes how to put one together using a perforated breadboard. What they sent me was a really nice printed circuit board. I have no idea where some of the components are supposed to go on this board. The 555 IC's are fairly straight froward once I figured out which side of the board and what direction pin one sits. I can guess at some of the capacitors, but the rest???
I do not have a EE degree, but I do have a fairly basic understanding of circuits (satellite communications maintainer). So, I should be able to figure out where the LEDs and the volt meter go in relation to the schematics in the D14.pdf. I have included pics of the PCB in case somebody here has a better idea of how the layout should look.
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Some days I get the sinking feeling that Orwell was an optimist!
I would be very careful using this board. IMO none of the traces look like
they will carry 30A's. I would bench test it first and see how hot it gets.
If it gets to hot the traces will lift off the board.
As I understand it (from the d14.pdf) the MOSFET is what handles the 30 amps and it doesn't mount to the pcb. I am probably going to mount it to a cpu heat sync or something.
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Some days I get the sinking feeling that Orwell was an optimist!
Im working on a sales catalog of parts and pieces for my website. Mainly im focused on the steel components, but I would like to offer FREE plans and information.
If anyone can send me links to info that deals with the various construction methods, plans, drawings, really good wiki pages, etc... I would certainly appreciate it.
The site is going to have stuff for sale, but I believe that the information should be freely available.
Thanks in advance folks!
"You don't always have to know ALL the answers, but you do need to know where to find them."