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Old 07-06-2009, 07:49 PM
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wasyoungonce (Brendan)
Certified Village Idiot

wasyoungonce is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Mexico city (Melb), Australia
Posts: 2,357
PWM dew heater

Funny enough I am at this moment getting some cct boards made for a FET driven 4 channel PWM dew heater I designed & prototyped up.

I found that many FET (or transistor) PWM dew heaters switched the heater thru Vcc rail. Thus when the output driver device was off there is Vcc (in most cases +12V DC) sitting on the outer shell of the heater connector. Some/many of these commercial dew heater use a metal RCA connector & +12V sitting on this outer shell is recipe for trouble.

So I designed up a FET cct that switches heater thru earth with the outer shell connected to earth, thus the outer shell is always earth.

I am tossing up whether to market these as I could pump them out at pretty much $100 Aust.

A low tech (cheap) solution indeed.
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