555 timer – Experimental Engineering

Posted on May 29, 2016 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

Mini USB Soldering Iron

Here’s a novel little gadget, a USB powered soldering iron. The heating tip on these is very small & might be useful for very small SMD work. Bigger joints not so much, as it’s only rated at 8W. (Still breaks the USB standard of 2.5W from a single port).

These irons aren’t actually too bad to use, as long as the limitations in power are respected. Since nearly everything has a USB power port these days, it could make for a handy emergency soldering iron.

The heater & soldering bit are a single unit, not designed to be replaced separately. (I’ve not managed to find replacement elements, but at £3 for the entire iron, it would be pretty pointless).
Above is the socket where the heater plugs in, safely isolating the plastic body from any stray heat.

The DC input is a 3.5mm audio jack, a non-standard USB to 3.5mm jack cable is supplied. Such non-standard cables have the potential to damage equipment that isn’t expecting to see 5v on an audio input if it’s used incorrectly.

There isn’t actually a switch on this unit for power management, but a clever arrangement of a touch button & vibration switch. The vertical spring in the photo above makes contact with a steel ball bearing pressed into the plastic housing, forming the touch contact.

The large MOSFET here is switching the main heater current, the silver cylinder in front is the vibration switch, connected in parallel with the touch button.

The main controller is very simple. It’s a 555 timer configured in monostable mode. Below is a schematic showing the basic circuit.

Big Clive also did a teardown & review of this iron. Head over to YouTube to watch.

Posted on December 3, 2013December 4, 2013 by The Engineer — Leave a comment

555 Flyback Driver

Here is a simple 555 timer based flyback transformer driver, with the PCB designed by myself for some HV experiments. Above is the Eagle CAD board layout.

The 555 timer is in astable mode, generating a frequency from about 22kHz to 55kHz, depending on the position of the potentiometer. The variable frequency is to allow the circuit to be tuned to the resonant frequency of the flyback transformer in use.

This is switched through a pair of buffer transistors into a large STW45NM60 MOSFET, rated at 650v 45A.

Input power is 15-30v DC, as the oscillator circuit is fed from an independent LM7812 linear supply.

Provision is also made on the PCB for attaching a 12v fan to cool the MOSFET & linear regulator.

Board initially built, with the heatsink on the linear regulator fitted. I used a panel mount potentiometer in this case as I had no multiturn 47K pots in stock.

Bottom of the PCB. The main current carrying traces have been bulked up with copper wire to help carry the potentially high currents on the MOSFET while driving a large transformer.
This board was etched using the no-peel toner transfer method, using parchement paper as the transfer medium.

Main MOSFET now fitted with a surplus heatsink from an old switchmode power supply. A Fan could be fitted to the top of this sink to cope with higher power levels.

This is the gate drive waveform while a transformer is connected, the primary is causing some ringing on the oscillator. The waveform without an attached load is a much cleaner square wave.

I obtained a waveform of the flyback secondary output by capacitively coupling the oscilloscope probe through the insulation of the HT wire. The pulses of HV can be seen with the decaying ringing of the transformer between cycles.