Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 31 August 2015 21:32
So, when it rains it pours, for 35$ delivered I got my hands on a PM2812, this one has the taller case because it has the jacks on the front of it, which is really cool, also its a two module PSU in the three module case because the second module doubles, so its a 60V/5A/60W, 60V/10A/120W!
Twice the power (Read it in Tim the Toolman Taylor voice)
Its also Fluke branded, so its from later in life than Philips branded ones and matches my other two which are also Fluke branded.
It did take quite a convoluted route to get to me, as I what showed up in the mail was a Fluke PM5193 50mhz Arbitrary Waveform Generator (It actually did a square wave only up to 20mhz and it was ok but nothing to write home about), so I had to send it back and that was a process in itself.
The interesting 'not working' was the display contrast was set to 0, but if you didnt know that was an option youd think the display was nearly invisible! HA! not a bad score for $35 shipped!
I do need to do some teardown in side, check the battery voltage, check the jacks inside, one is unscrewed, so I need to check it that we dont have a loose wire to short something out.
Aaaanyway (in a tired voice).
One thing that has become obvious... is the need to handle more than one PSU attached to the GPIB PSU Front End. We sorta kinda sorta handle this, its recorded in its configuration file but we need to explicitly point to it. I need a way to auto-detect it on the bus, but thats very hard.
Internally, the software is designed to display multiple channels (only 3 on screen at one time, but it can internally handle 32 channels).
An inbuilt device add/find/remove configuration mechanism is needed.
What else is happening on the software front? Trying to deal with errors in a meaningful way. If you specify a voltage that would exceed the output power of the channel, we need to display an error... and not block the rest of the system from updating data and so on, and where do you display it? On a triple channel system, a single channel is not wide eough to print the message on....
(dont include links in your comments.)