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Project development, ideas, and suggestions / Digitally Controlled Bench PSU
Many electronics people will build a bench power supply at one point in their professional or hobby career. I too have made a couple over the years. However, most of the time I used what was available in the shop(s) where I did my work. One type of PSU in particular always fascinated me: a digitally controlled PSU. No potentiometers, but a keyboard where you punch in the numbers and get exactly that.
Those digitally controlled PSUs are rather expensive toys. Of course depending on the actual accuracy, but they are not the cheapo China stuff you often see. So I started wondering what it would take to design one on a reasonable budget. 25 years ago, when I saw the first digital PSU, it would have been all too expensive for a hobbyist to come by. Most of the electronics are now affordable and it should be possible to, at least, "take a cursory design look".
Attached is a schematic that should show my thoughts so far. [attachment=0]
The design is for 0...30V and 0...3A (90W) controllable at ~1mV and ~0.1mA steps. The actual accuracy is still out for testing and I assume that noise and non-linearity will be a factor to look at when time comes. The basic design allows for 0...42V (max 45V) and (at least) 0...4A, but then all the components should be re-calculated to match such setup. Also, some components need to be voltage matched for a higher input voltage.
The design is a dual control-loop where the first stage is a switching PSU which is fed back to assure a 2.5V drop over the secondary analog control stage. The secondary stage is also responsible for the current limiter. The idea here is to reduce the power loss in the BJT (Q4) in the analog stage. A differential amplifier feeds the switching PSU feedback line to settle at Vout+2.5V. Estimated power loss is 12..15W (max) with a constant 3A output current, where the regulating BJT is responsible for 7.5W. The current limiter is a differential amplifier over a high-side sense-resistor, which controls the same regulating BJT.
The whole setup is controlled by devices on an I2C bus (and one shutdown signal) on a 6-pin header. Both the output voltage and current are set by two 16bit DACs on the I2C bus. The resulting output in both voltage and current are measured back with 15bit ADCs (16 bit differential), also on the I2C bus. Finally, another 12bit 8-channel ADC (I2C) measures auxiliary parameters such as input voltage, switcher voltage, limiter voltages and up to 4 temperatures (with NTCs).
There is no active down-regulation of the output voltage. There are only bleeders on the output capacitor(s). It may be necessary to do active control. I have not yet decided (tell me if you think it is required).
An auxiliary power supply for +12V, +5V and -12V is used to supply the various components on the board.The 5V part is powerful enough to be used to power a small CPU board with I2C and the user- and computer-interfaces.
The main PSU board, without the 2x30V/100VA power-transformer, is estimated to cost somewhere around $75 in components. No exact calculations have been done yet.
My question would be if you'd like to comment on the design. Any comment is welcome. Especially welcome are the "D'oh!" design error comments ;-) There may be some component values that are inaccurate or plain wrong, which would be nice to know.
