DIY ELECTRONIC LOAD | 100w 10a max | Bench load | DIY test equipment

Описание: This video features a DIY test load which I built to replace my off the shelf one which had failed. This video took an extremely long time as I kept having to order new parts to fix issues as I found them. I don’t know if the DAC and ADC built into the micro controller board I used were faulty from the factory, or if they are all as unreliable as this one, but I found that they were very giving near random results. The other issue is they did not have fine enough resolution for my use case, I ended up using an external ADC and DAC which I found to work much better. I interfaced them to the micro controller with an I2C data bus. Of my final design I find the most temperamental part is the current sensor IC, it seems to waver in its accuracy, and I was never able to work out exactly why, so readings are normally off by 10-20ma.

My coding abilities are largely limited to searching stack overflow, and asking AI to do it for me, so I had quite a lot of issues getting the code to work reliably. Fortunately I have friends who are much more capable than I, they were extremely helpful. I don’t think I could have finished this project without their help.

I think I could fix the main issues I ran into with some adjustments to the de-bounce logic for the rotary encoder button but I wanted to get this video up, and it works well enough as is, so I decided not to change anything in case I broke it again.

I decided to try and build this myself rather than buying one off the shelf because I wanted an excuse to mess with some micro controller and try to learn more about them, but with all that being said, given how long this has taken me I would advise you to just buy one from the likes of Ali Express, the parts for this cost about the same as a whole unit so its no cost saving and given how long its taken to get working right I’d only recommend it if you wanted a challenge or are doing it for the fun of the project.

Thanks very much for watching, and I will see you all in the next one.