Tag Archives: Switched inductor regulator

Testing Vpp control

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Setting up:

It’s been a while since I have worked with the board powered up.  I hooked up the lithium cell and USB cable to my Computer, then the charger started doing it’s job. I then started the serial terminal on my computer.  I hooked up my Oscilloscope to watch Vpp live during testing.

The code still in the board tries to regulate Vpp according to the reading it gets from the ADC.  This isn’t working well.  Since It’s been a while, I built and re-uploaded the project without any changes. This reminded me how I had the tools set up. Of course, the behavior of the board didn’t change with this upload. Next, I disabled the feedback loop to do my testing.

Voltage verses duty cycle:

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Code Cleanup and Boost Circuit testing (Firmware V00E)

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This week I was reading through the SDK documentation, and realized a better way of handling serial events.  I was setting a flag and using a software timer to handle those events once a second. I also found that there is a webserver example in the IOT example.  I think this server is much simpler than ESP Ginx.  I have decided to try to use this example to move forward in the design

I decided to set up an OS task that I can post to that will do things like display the serial menu.  I am already using a task for serial handling.  (I grabbed it from an example and modified it for my uses).

I started by changing the UART task to a more generic task. I changed uart_recvTask to taskHandler. Then I just call an os_event_post with the action I want taken.  This allows the system to decide when to start the action. Displaying the menu and other tasks will generally happen faster this way.

As soon as I tried to do anything with GPIO16, I got lots of reboots.  It seems that the problems I was having with the Voltage boost circuit may have actually been GPIO16 problems. I have moved the control pin from GPIO16 to GPIO13 for enabling the voltage boost circuit.  With GPIO13 connected to the base of Q4 to enable/disable the boost circuit, the firmware booted and worked reliably.  After that I changed the filter resistor back to 10 Ohms as I had originally specified. And… It didn’t boot.

I replaced the 10 Ohm resistor with a 100 Ohm Resistor.  Still wouldn’t boot. I found that if I could get Q4 turned off, then the system would boot and run reliably.  As soon as I turned Q4 back on, the system would reboot and hang. So I tried adding a 100 μF between +BATT and GND to try to filter any electrical noise. It didn’t work.

I connected a bench power supply set at 3.3V to the boost circuit input, and I got it to partially work. I got 8 volts out of it for a few seconds.  I reinserted the GPIO16 initialization functions and no problems when no power is connected to the boost circuit.

I added some code that allows me to increment or decrement the prescaler using + and – keys respectively. When I hit the – key when the prescaler was at 0 to get to 255, it would reboot. When I hit the + key to go from 99 to 100 it would reboot.  So for now the prescaler is limited to the range of 0 to 99.

I am encouraged by getting the voltage on VPP higher than any supply voltage on the board. It appears that I need to create a separate ground plane just for the boost circuit.  If I couple it to the main ground with a low value inductor, I might be able to eliminate the problems it has caused.  I have uploaded the new version of the code. It still has very little commenting, however, I think it is cleaner and easier to read.