Electrolytic Etcher–Design progress–Part 3

Well … that was more successful.

The new design without the LED and with the potentiometer wired in correctly … works fine.

I’ll get around to wiring in the LED at some later stage. For now, the etch controller/driver appears to be wired correctly and is giving me an output voltage. When I get around to getting my test equipment out of storage, I’ll do some voltage testing of the output.

 

Here is the wired solution. SPDT, Potentiometer, banana plugs attached to alligator clips and using a lamp to test the voltage output. I haven’t heated the shrinky on the AC lines yet, because I will need to resolder them into the jiffy box, and adding  the shrinky to the connection at this stage will just be a pain in the arse.

Here is the wiring for the Pot. I got the Retro knob from Jaycar.

The SPDT toggle switch came from an old project. I’ve only connected COM and Leg 1. In this configuration, it is a simple On/Off switch.

And here it is turned on. The left image is the lamp when the pot is at about 60%, the right image is at 100%. When the pot is dialled less than 60%, there is little to no light coming from it. I’d say that that is because of the minimum voltage required by the lamp. By the way … having a lamp like this is a good test tool for making sure that you are getting some power.

The next steps for this project are to:

• Put the circuit in the jiffy box;
• Make an etched plate for the jiffy box with labels for the dial, power and the two banana plug sockets;
• Maybe add an LED to indicate power.

Well … apart from that, it’s job done. I’ll be using this driver in later articles showing it in use. The first article will be making the etched plate for the driver! I’m going to do that with a scanned, hand-drawn image, something a little bit steam-punk.