I got this oh so glorious power supply from Freedgeek, which has most of what I need.
So I don't need pretty much any of these cables.
The only all I actually need is two 8 pin CPU power connectors, because I'm taking each
one and going to each individual board.
However, this one only has one, though I went and also grabbed a whole bunch of cable mod
cables. So I grabbed a whole bunch of cable mod cables that someone was going to toss.
So I have another CPU power connector here. So I'm going to deep in these, well either deep in it or just cut it and then splice
it in. But I'll pull a whole bunch of 12 volt and ground lines, both from Molex and probably
from this PCI-E connector, and just splice it all into this connector here.
There's a very good chance that I might just be able to deep in all of this, though I don't
have the tool on me.
So I'll probably just end up snipping a whole bunch of stuff and heat shrinking down anything
I don't need. So off to that, and also I'll be actually not these ones.
So I have these six, six pin Molex connectors, which aren't actually what I'm going to be
using. Although they probably were fine.
My nice bunch of goodies. What I'm actually going to be using, if I can find them, ha, it's this.
So this is actually a 10 pin Molex connector.
But I'm just going to cut off two of the pins and just use that instead, assuming the polarity
is correct, which I actually need to double check still, but I can do that right now.
So I have my nice four pin CPU power connector and it's going to plug in, it's not going
to be, it's not going to interface nicely with this. Actually labeled board, I have VCC on the bottom and then ground on the top, which if
I look at the connector, I have exactly the opposite of that.
Well, that sucks.
Can I put it in backwards?
No, I can't because Molex is keyed like that. Okay.
Well, that complicates things a little bit.
Okay, so that either means I deep in all of this, or I just force it in upside down,
which is actually an option.
I think I may end up just deep pinning all of them, yeah, because I just straight up
got that backwards.
Oh, shite, pardon my French.
I know I got it wrong because PCIe has ground on the top and VCC on the bottom, which lines
up with how I pinned it out, where CPU power is inverted.
So that's where that issue came from, okay.
I mean, I could get away with just using this and using the PCIe connector, but with this
power supply, I'd still need to swap out one of the other cables.
That will connect into a problem, but I still need power for both boards.
And realistically, this one, which is the middle chunk capacitor, is going to be a high
power board than this small one. I mean, just look at the size of the components, like I'm going to need to actively heat sink
all of these. I'm also going to have to actively heat sink these so they don't go boom too.
Ask me how I know.
Okay, I'm going to actually go grab the deep pinning tool and see what I can make happen
with the connections I have currently, and I'll grab some of the Molex tools as well.
All right, so I went and grabbed all the tools I need in theory, couldn't find the deep pinning
tool for Molex, but grabbed some nice crimps and a crimper, and then promptly realized the
fact that I have two PCIe cables, and they are conveniently oriented the correct way
to power each board. I'm pretty sure, not 100% sure, but pretty sure, each individual PCIe cable with only
six conductors going should provide enough power for what I need, obviously to be confirmed.
And if that is the case, these extra cables are just going to be chilling.
And regardless, I'm probably going to trim off all of my, all of the unused cables and
take the sense pin on the power supply and hook it up to an external switch on the outside
of the case. So I can turn this thing on and off, so I can turn the control side on and off independently
from the power side, because that just seems like a very good idea given the scope of what
this project is very quickly becoming.
But in the interim, I'm going to get this power supply and crap out of the way, and
get some soldering going for these PCIe connectors, so I'm going to solder each one of these,
one of these into each one of the boards, and then I can have some power, I may end
up having to snip off these connectors here. TBD.
But we shall see.
We shall see.
Fun times with me and doing the jank.
Yeah, thanks for, thanks for watching if you're so inclined, and if this actually makes the
final cut. I should honestly be a little bit surprised, but you never know.
Let's do this chunky bit first.
Okay, so I want to be taking this and go like, oh great, the pins don't line up.
My favorite, the pins don't line up, and the whole size is incorrect.
Man, I'm just having bad times with this recently.
Even though this is supposed to be a standard pitch, okay, well, if in doubt, jank city,
yo. Yeah, that's not going to fly, is it?
Okay, well, that's an interesting complication that I wasn't anticipating.
So, in terms of things I can do immediately regardless is desolder these connections.
Okay, that's having it.
Come on, you can do it, Haco.
Maybe you can't.
All right, time to bust out the alternative soldering iron.
This is a nice little TS100 that I acquired not too long ago, and just generally speaking
I've been very happy with it, although I don't quite see the chisel tip I was hoping to use.
Oh, that one.
Okay, so the full-on backup plan here, if all else really fails epically, is to just
snip the conductors and direct solder them, though obviously I would really rather not
do that. Okay, well, actually, I guess that's not that obvious.
I would really rather not direct solder my conductors off of a power supply just in general.
Okay.
Aha, there we go.
Okay. Sorry, brief little detour, as I probably think that a cable is a different cable.
Okay, let's just make this bad boy.
Okay, so let's get this going.
Coming. There we go.
Okay, so let's take this one out first.
So one of the downsides of this particular setup is I did not get a lot of thermal relief
between these pins or these holes and the ground planes, which means if it's on this
one, which means that they're not the same.
The whole sizes are different between this board and this board, even though they're supposed
to be the same. So I have the gloriously fun time of figuring out what the heck I'm going to do about that
in the interim. I'm going to solder this one up because for the time being, this is the one of interest
because I don't have the rest of the circuitry built to do the other one, yet this I'm actually
going to do some fan because this is going to be a non-trivial amount of solder, not a
small amount of soldering. Sorry for the audio.
Speaking of those non-thermal relief ground planes, that's what I'm struggling with right
now. So if I can get away with it, I'm actually going to flip this over and solder the other
side too just to make sure it's a good connection because, yeah.
Okay, now comes some fun stuff.
So I get to do the ground sides. So I'm going to do a bad thing and just prank my soldering iron to make this easier.
This thing can get hot. All right, one, one, three.
Swits. So I'm actually going to flip this over and go from the bottom again at this higher time.
Yeah, that looks a lot better. Okay, now I get to think about what the heck I'm going to do with this one.
I guess I also get to try to find the other connector that I inevitably put somewhere
done. There, okay. All right, back at it with bad ideas.
So I have decided I'm going to take a stab at, oh, I have decided that I'm going to try
to just thotter just the tips.
Don't do this, ever. This is a terrible idea in every single way and is almost certainly not going to work
properly. Yeah, I would not recommend this in any way, shape, or form.
This is a terrible idea. Don't do this.
But that's why I'm doing it.
So you know why not to.
Okay, so let's start with this one because this one is going to be the biggest pain in
the world. Sorry, audio. This is going to be a time lapse most likely anyway.
Yeah, this has got comfortably in the do not do this file.
This is just dumb.
Okay, well, oh yeah, also crank the temp if you're going to try this because you're just
don't just just don't do this.
Okay, it's working.
Okay, no, I'm not getting decent. I am getting joints.
These are not even close to what I would call decent joints.
Not even a little bit, but it is technically working.
Okay, well, I'm honestly kind of baffled at the moment because that shouldn't have worked.
Wow. It worked. Holy moly.
Okay, cool. That was a mind-bogglingly bad idea that somehow worked.
Okay, to give you a little bit more of a close-up on what I was actually doing here.
So I had, okay, I can probably show you one of this on this one here.
So literally what I was doing was just taking the tips, just the tips and then having a solder
fillet essentially around the entire tip, joining just this little tiny tippy piece around.
And it actually fricking worked somehow and it's actually like vaguely stable.
I would not trust this for a whole bunch of plugs and unplugged, but for what I'm doing,
good enough.
So now, honestly, legitimately baffled by that one.
Okay.
So, now what?
Okay, I'm going to do some blast for me.
Where are my sneakers?
This is another one of those, don't do this. This power supply was destined for the Carpegio.
Although of course, your power supplies are great.
It's seen better days. I'm actually probably going to clean this up and give it a nice little blast of air.
But yeah, this is not going to be used to power a computer ever again.
So what I'm doing is I'm just going to snip these two conductors here.
So this green one is what actually tells the power supply that it's connected to a motherboard
if it's pulled to ground. So I'm pulling that off and then I'm pulling the ground off.
And for right now, don't do this.
I'm just going to solder them together. Eventually, I will pull both of these out to a switch.
And this will supply me all of my power for...
Come on, there we go. Actually, I guess I can just twist these together.
Okay, easy there.
Okay, so what I'm going to do here is just snip the back side.
Because the amount of solder that's on this side is substantially less than on the other side,
which means it'll be a lot easier to pull the conductors out through that side
rather than trying to pull this gigantic blob of solder through the board this way.
So hopefully that should make my life quite a bit easier.
Hopefully. We'll see if that actually pans out.
And then just last words. I hope not, but, you know,
so with anything in this company,
you say something and then you immediately eat your words.
Okay, got some of it. Hey, there we go.
So that wasn't pretty, but if it works, it works, yo.
If it works, it works. Okay, next one.
This one will hopefully be worse. It should be better actually.
The 5V plane, or sorry, the VCC plane on this board is not quite as numerous as the ground planes.
If I recall correctly, I have two completely independent ground planes on this thing.
And these ground pins might actually be connected to other things as well.
Actually, this bottom plane is a 5V plane.
Where is it ground?
No, I think it's, I think it's 15V, sorry, 12V, whatever VCC is.
How the brain?
Brain and not a having it today.
Okay, so this is some good work.
It's generally speaking pretty good.
Obviously for stuff like that, that's not going to do it, but that's fine.
I don't expect it to.
Okay, so actually I'm going to quickly desolder this inductor as well.
Come on.
Okay.
Come on. I actually have to make a couple of modifications to this particular board as well.
So I went through a whole bunch of troubleshooting after I blew up two of these gate drivers,
and spent a whole bunch of time doing simulations in LT-SPICE,
which is essentially a circuit simulation software.
So what I wasn't sure about was if I was like overcurrenting these chips or something like that,
I'm pretty sure what was actually happening was they were just melting themselves to death.
Originally I had a 2.2 microfarad capacitor here,
and my assumption was that that was what was causing me the problem,
and its capacity was just too big. Turns out what's most likely happened was actually my inductance was too small for the rest of my circuit,
and my current was just spiking way too hard.
So from the most recent iteration of my simulations,
I'm actually going to pull this wire out, put the 2.2 microfarad cap back in,
and then I just wound this toroid a few more times to get it up to 27 microhenrys up from like the 10,
or something like that that was the first time, and I'm hoping that that should allow me to drive this second side properly.
And once I actively cool these two chips,
hopefully they won't find themselves in a fiery grave,
but that's optimistic,
because they are very small chips for the amount of power going through them,
and I'm pretty sure if I had been thinking this through properly,
I would have sourced the higher power versions,
and I might have to, because there's a very good chance that they're going to just die as soon as I try to turn this thing on.
But now I'm going to put this other cap back.
So the one, the caps that I was using, or that I am using for the most part,
I ended up sourcing from an also glorious place known as the Vancouver Hack Space,
would highly recommend going out and exploring your local hack space
if you have the opportunity, and if one exists.
They are fantastic places to meet other makers and find stuff that normally you'd never find
for any reasonable price,
because often people will just bring in stuff that's kind of functional or just like old,
but still very good.
So the caps that I have, they're film capacitors, which are made by Philips,
at least the ones that I'm using in this particular location,
and they are very, very high quality capacitors.
They'd probably go for several dollars a piece when they were new at least.
Obviously, at this point in their lifespan, data sheets don't exist for them anymore,
so I would take hazarded guess that, okay, this isn't hot enough.
They're not going to sell for nearly that much anymore. Also, they're hilariously over-spec for what I'm using them for,
because they're rated for like 600 volts, or something like that.
I don't remember the exact number, but it's like hilariously large.
And so, entertainingly over-spec for what I'm using them for,
but come on, you can do it.
Come on, get out of there. Hello, excuse me.
Come on, why?
Thank you. Why, that was so difficult.
I have no idea.
Now I have a not so fun time of trying to solder this in.
Mostly because I don't want to try to go full tilt right off the cuff,
given the amount of power I'm working with here.
If something goes wrong, it can go very wrong very fast.
So I have this standard power inlet.
I have a bunch of connectors I'm going to take.
So here's going to be my switch.
I have one output side where I'm connecting the two different sides of the switch to my rectifier.
So this can handle three phase, but obviously if you put two phases into it, that'll work too.
This is actually out from, normally used for welders.
So you have your three phases in, and then you have a negative and positive out, and that's DC out.
So on this side is my two separate inlets.
So these are fully isolated from each other.
What this switch does is it switches from either having my single phase power in or my three phase power in.
This I'm probably just going to leave disconnected initially because I don't want to try to connect this thing up to three phase right away.
I'm going to take one of my ground conductors and take that third pin from this inlet and just connect it to the chassis.
And then this is going to be my live in neutral wire that go into my switch.
And then depending on which setting it's in, either this three phase is connected to the output or exclusive or the single phase is connected.
So this allows me to switch between the two if I want to, when I want to, because that's going to happen.
These are some chocktastic, I think 10 gauge.
So three by 10, three by 12, 12 gauge.
So these are 12 gauge wire.
These won't die.
None of the circuits that we have that I have access to would actually over, this is the wrong crimper.
Well, that's unfortunate.
Time to do the giant.
Yeah, I will actually do this properly and not just use a pair of pliers to cut this.
So, so during this up, I'm not going to lie.
It is going to be kind of janky.
Let's see. Is this going to just line up nicely?
Looks like it might.
Okay, well, I'm glad I looked at the other side of this first.
So if you look over here, I have some hilariously tall spikes of solder that I'm going to have to get rid of if I'm going to have a chance and heck of actually getting this cap in.
So I'm going to do some good wick.
Good wick and get rid of that first before even considering getting the cap anywhere near here.
Okay, top side is reasonable.
Over to the bottom side.
I'll do one pass on this side too, hoping that it'll get most of the solder out, but I suspect that that's just not going to happen.
And I'm going to have to dance around trying to melt part of the solder or one half of the solder and rocking the capacitor in,
which I'd really rather not do, but I don't think I'm going to have an option for this particular instance.
Come on.
Okay, well, it just didn't work.
So though I'm trying to remove solder,
so though I'm trying to remove solder here, putting a little bit of solder on the iron before you try to apply this down.
This applies to doing any soldering in general.
If you have some solder on the iron first,
it allows temperature to go from the iron to whatever you're working on a lot easier.
It's just weird thermodynamics shenanigans.
Oh, that actually worked pretty well. Essentially, the molten solder wicks onto the part you're,
and like interfaces with the part you're trying to melt or solder to a lot better than just the bare iron.
So if you can do it,
have your iron just like with a little bit of solder on the tip.
Wherever you're trying to solder,
your life will be a lot easier.
Okay, well, I didn't quite do what I sought out to.
And unfortunately, there's still some solder in those holes,
which sucks, so you can see there's still some on this hole.
This you can actually kind of see through. So that was what I was hoping for for both of them, but it did quite pan out.
Now what I get to do is do some cleanup.
Though this isn't fully necessary, I would rather just do it if I can.
So this is just electronics grade, isopropyl alcohol.
The Goodwick that I was using, it has flux integrated into the copper braid,
which deposits when you're rubbing it off so you can kind of see that gross brown color.
That's the flux that's in the copper braid.
Also some of that would have been from the solder as well.
It helps prevent oxide buildup when you're soldering and allows you to build a better joint.
Or in the case of the copper braid, it allows it to wick better.
But in general, I would suggest cleaning it off.
Though depending on your circuit, it probably doesn't matter,
especially if it's something like this, it really doesn't matter.
Because this is a personal project, no critical functions,
nothing that's super super super sensitive to specific conditions.
So flux in general is not the most pleasant substance to work with.
Like it's not great for you, is what I mean.
Okay, so here comes the fun part.
So here's my capacitor, it needs to go in there.
Let's talk about rocking it in, which is going to be what I'm doing here.
Essentially, I'm going to melt the solder on one side first
and get that leg as far in as I can, and then try to get the other leg in after that.
I'm actually going to use these like this here.
This is going to be some jank, full disclosure.
But you know, such is life. That's why you're here to watch me, or me and or Linus,
and or whomever else struggle with some sketch.
Okay, so let's get that solder in there.
Come on, A-O. So there it popped through.
Now I get to do the other side. Actually, I'm going to adjust this backside a little.
A-O success. Okay, so I got it through almost sets.
Yay!
Now my life gets a little bit easier. Okay, so now I'm just going to clean up this solder joint.
Because though this works, I'd rather get a slightly better connection
than just like the jamming it through connection.
Okay, so those joints are a lot cleaner now, and in general, just a lot better.
So, now comes the next jank.
I'm probably going to trim those leads off later, but that's a later endeavor.
That's for these.
Oh, wait, what?
Did I part? Okay, time for some snoopy.
Sorry, Molex. Love your indexing features, but bye.
So it looks like I got this right on one of them and wrong on the other.
But also, so I know I checked the spec.
So this is not Molex. Not the same as PCIe.
So I learned today the classic.
Because why would a standard be standard, right?
Alright, so I sourced this nice 4U rack mount case for, let's just say, very cheap from some online retailer.
Sorry, not online retailer. Online marketplace, which is going to act as my enclosure for my induction heater.
I have a lot of my other components around me, around here with me as well, including my capacitor, my smoothing capacitor for after the rectifier.
My three phase rectifier that's designed for welders.
A nice little switch that is going to act as my switch between three phase power in and single phase power in.
I'll start off using single phase power in and eventually I want to allow myself the headroom to switch to three phase in the long run.
Just to allow a lot more power and to heat up and melt a lot more metal.
Both bigger and different types like possibly copper or aluminum to melt those down and possibly do some casting or something else like that in the future.
With a lot of my components, I have over-respect them to heck and back to allow for that.
So this thing is rated up to 400 volts.
It's a humongous capacitor that'll work for way more power than I'm going to put through this.
This switch is rated for 400 plus volts, up to even I think 600 in some instances.
This rectifier is good for three phase power.
I can actually see the reading on it, but I'm pretty sure it's good for 220 or higher.
And then obviously I have my tank capacitor, which is hilariously large and hilariously over-specified.
I ended up doing the math on this thing and in theory, in theory,
we could put the entire power, all of the power in lab two through this capacitor and it wouldn't even overpower it.
Which is just entertaining and would never actually happen, but you know.
I also got some breakers. So I'm planning on plugging this thing into a 20 amp circuit just to give myself a little bit more headroom current-wise.
And these are 16 amp breakers.
They are designed for a higher voltage rating, but that should be fine for what I'm doing.
And this is just so these trips in the machine instead of having the breakers trip in the wall.
It's a lot easier and cheaper to replace these things than it would be to have someone come in and replace the actual breakers in our electrical service.
Or in any electrical service that I'm working with.
Though breakers do have a pretty long lifespan, they do have a finite number of trips.
So just giving again more headroom and more space ever around it.
But I am going to switch gears and just tear this thing down.
Alright, so at least the bulk of this is torn out now.
I noticed there's a whole bunch of front buttons in here that I would love to be able to use.
Unfortunately, literally every single one of the buttons on the front panel of this case is a momentary button.
Which pretty much just means I can't turn it on and leave it on.
Like for example, if I wanted to turn on the power supply for the control electronics,
I'd need to have a non-momentary switch that connects sense line on the power supply to ground to keep it on.
But everything on the front here is momentary, so I can't use literally any of them for that functionality.
So I'm probably going to end up tearing out every single one of these buttons
and replacing them with something that I can actually use in the long run.
Which is kind of really irritating, honestly.
If any of these were non-momentary, I could just hook that up to the power supply
and I'd be done with that part, but no, couldn't be easy.
But this case also has some integrated fans.
Now these particular fans have some nice grills on the front.
I was like, oh, very promising. Maybe these things are going to be strong enough just to supply all the cooling for the entire system.
They are rated for 12 volts DC and 0.38 amps.
And I turned them on and they're reasonable.
But honestly, I don't think they're going to be able to dissipate enough energy out of this system to be able to keep it going.
So I may end up swapping these out for some other fans that I have sourced
slash will source to act as cooling for the whole system.
And I may also end up moving this bracket somewhere else in the case that's more convenient for me.
Because at the moment, I'm probably going to have power in
and my mains voltage side in the back of the case over here
with all of my breakers and everything in the back and both of my power ins,
which for right now we're going to be two 120 volt power plugs,
something similar to what they had on here in this one.
But ideally something a little more beefy because this thing is fluffy and just not great.
I'll use two of those, one that's for the power supply for the control electronics
and then one that I will probably end up plugging into my variac
to allow me to control how much voltage is going into the power side of the system.
Now go through the rectifier and into this gigantic capacitor
and eventually into the inverter and then out through the tubes or the copper piping.
But I have a little more tear down to do, but at this point it's mostly done
and it just kind of have to start laying out where I think everything's going to end up.
But for now, I'm tearing out a whole bunch of buttons and all that fun stuff
and then trying to figure out my more or less final layout in the case.
So I've done a little bit of sizing up for some of the stuff.
This is my breaker bar with some din rail.
This is I'm going to use to mount this to this area.
I'll end up doing some cuts across these bars so this will stick out
and I'll also actually end up chopping these down so it fits more or less flush with this top area
and I'll have something that comes up from the bottom that blocks the bottom too
just to ensure that the high voltage isn't easily accessible from outside.
But I have to chop these down first.
Eventually I'll be putting some brackets and risers or some bolts through here
with spacers to hold this off and hold this against this piece, these pieces in here.
And I may actually end up welding the bottom of these PCIe covers to the base
just to beef up the contact between them to make sure that these breakers don't move around too much.
For now, off to the bandsaw. So I like our bandsaw quite a bit since it's been tuned up and works a ton better.
One unfortunate downside with cutting this particular rail is it leaves some disgustingly sharp corners and edges on here
so I'm actually going to take this to our grinder and sanding setup and round off these edges
just to make sure that there's nothing sharp that someone could cut themselves on if they weren't paying attention.
Okay, so I ended up finding a very convenient place for the switch.
It's particularly nice in this instance because I don't actually even need to remove these cross struts.
These can actually just stay put and I can just clamp this onto those to give me all the mechanical strength I'd need for this switch.
And this is again to switch in between using three phase power in versus two phase power in
if I ever end up doing that. But initially this is just going to act as an on off switch for the circuit.
So this is for the power side I guess to be more specific.
So this is very convenient.
Alright, and I have another switch.
So that's perfect.
I have my two 12 gauge wires coming out
and these are going to be my power in for the time being.
And then I'll pull power out at the bottom.
So here is my two cables for my one 10 or single phase power in that goes into the side
and then power is going to come out the bottom, go across.
Go across immediately to the breaker and then that'll go into the rest of the circuit.
Alright, so I have located where I want the breaker to sit.
And of course I moved it very far away.
So I have my breaker up my little breaker set.
I want to put it right in here.
So there on the other side and then I'll mount some holes in these two plates.
That'll hold this entire assembly against here and I'll put some support brackets above and below.
Just to make sure that no one can poke anything in there.
And electrocute or give themselves a very nasty electric shock to be more specific.
But to do that I have to remove some metal.
In comes small air powered rotary tool.
Which is kind of just a little bit nicer to handle and work with than an angle grinder.
Especially in somewhere this size. Though I may very swiftly regret that decision.
You'll certainly find out just as I find out here.
I'm just going to slap some cardboard back here just to protect that area up there.
Not that I would recommend doing this particular endeavor.
Because cardboard is kind of flammable.
And I'm going to be tossing some sparks.
Alright, time to see how immediately I regret this decision.
Very immediately. Shuffle shuffle shuffle shuffle.
So I need to actually be able to cut.
This needs to overhang.
And you can't see anything anymore.
Let's put you right there.
And now.
Make sure it's too smooth out of the way.
Alright.
Vroom vroom. Vroom vroom.
Okay, that's fun.
The more you know. So this turns out this little middle plate is literally just attached by this one screw.
So I very easily could have just undone that to remove it.
Details, details, details.
This one is attached to the rest of the plate though.
So that still would have had to come out anyway.
Oh, that's the classic. Okay.
Time to take out the top.
And it's gone. Fit check.
Fit check fit check fit check.
It fits, it fits, it fits, it fits. That's actually a relative, well, that's higher than I would like honestly.
But it'll do. So now I just have to make a bottom plate that covers this and then trim down the top to cover this top piece.
In the long run, I will need to access.
Actually, no, I won't. Once it's assembled, all of these can just be left as is.
So how we'll actually do this is I'll wire everything up.
I'll drive fit everything, make sure that my wire lengths are long enough and there's enough stress relief in any of the cables.
I'm not going to damage anything. Then I will do the wiring, connect this to the plate, something like that with these extra little slots in the din rail.
And then the covers will just be there right off the cuff.
So I won't have to worry about anyone contacting any of these things in here.
This actually gives me quite a bit of working room in the bottom to make sure that I have enough strain relief in the cable.
So now I'm just going to round off those edges and then should be good to go.
Alright, so this thing's all closed up. I'm calling it for the day because it's late o'clock.
Hopefully I'll be able to get the rest of the power electronics more or less laid out in here.
And then I can start figuring out where I want all the control circuitry to end up.
And then I get to start figuring out where all the water cooling is going to go, which is going to be a mess.
That's certainly going to be a heck of a time.
And probably not going to be a Linus thing because I would like to have a boss at the end of this video still.
And there's enough stuff in here that if it's powered on and I didn't do my job correctly, it could kill you.
So that's fun. Anyway, to the next day.
Something I realized while I was about to try to weld up a couple of these together to make a block for this is
if I actually just cut one more of these out, I can center the breakers and have material on both sides.
So I don't have to have a top piece and a bottom piece, which will just make my life quite a bit easier in the long run.
I'll end up having to chop off a bit more of the material in here with an angle grinder.
But honestly, that's really not that big of a deal.
I'll probably end up taking this side off here and removing this one rather than going this way and moving closer to the inputs
just to give myself space for a bigger input down the road.
But now off to the welder.
I know you're not going to be able to see a ton of this, but I just want to get this welded up and have these relatively straight.
It doesn't matter too much because at least from what I can tell, there's a fair bit of wiggle room in the actual box or in the actual case.
So I can have them relatively close together and still be a-okay.
But time for 10 nips.
Also be careful. Even if it doesn't look hot, it's probably ridiculously hot after welding.
Anything that you're welding is going to be smoking.
Ask me how I know that that is a thing because I totally haven't done it to myself several times.
Or I just burned the bejesus out of my hand without realizing that it's going to be really hot.
Now that mystery metal coating is off, I can go up and finish welding along this full seam.
Looking at how this first weld panned out, I added some filler material in all three of these.
I also don't have any filler material that's properly thin enough for this thickness of weld.
I ended up just kind of welding these two pieces together without any filler at all,
which might be what I try to do for the rest of this because that seemed to pan out a lot better.
I'm going to start by trying to join these top pieces together just to give a little bit more structure to the top section.
Then I'll do a full weld along this entire seam just for extra structure.
Then eventually I'll take out this chunk in the middle with an angle grinder or something similar to that.
Back to the welding. My favorite.
That wasn't atrocious. It was not good.
To any welder, you know I am not doing very well.
But for what I need, it's good enough.
I may not do the full joint across because, holy moly, is this thing warping like nobody's freaking business.
Just because it's so thin.
And honestly, for what I need this thing to do, this is probably good enough.
Like that's not going to give. Did some nice sandblasting and it's very shiny.
It's still warped as heck, but yeah, this is thin enough that that's really not that big of a deal.
Let's see, so I've got a nice warp in that direction.
That's probably going to be a good part from that.
You know what, let's just see if it lines up before I mess around with that too much.
If it doesn't line up, I'm going to have to readdress my, figure out another plan.
Okay, let's pop that out. Take that out.
Put that down.
Holy moly, is that bent a heck?
Oh, that sounded like a weld breaking.
Because it probably was a weld breaking.
Aha, I found a problem.
So the bottom of each one I put too close together so it won't fit into all three slots.
That sucks.
I'm with the tops. The tops will work honestly, like they do not have to be great.
If it lines up with two, that's way more than good enough.
So I'm going to take this to the hammering plate, better known as our welding bench.
Actually our grinding bench because it's way thicker.
Give it a good couple of whacks to flatten it out.
And then I'm going to take some of these edges, these bottoms and just thin them out.
Just to make my life a little bit easier so I don't have to re-weld it.
Because the nice thing is I can just make these thinner and honestly for this it really doesn't matter.
It is really quite irrelevant.
I shortened up all of these tabs a little bit and gave these a good couple of whacks to really get it a lot flatter.
It's still not flat, but again for this it really doesn't matter.
And hey, oh that'll do don't care.
Sorry Shrek. But I have one, two and a bit roughly kind of screw holes I can put into.
But no one is never going to bolt to anything regardless because I promptly removed that part without realizing it.
So time to take some more angle grinder slash cut off disc to this, trim all of these down.
And then, yeah get in there ever so slowly.
Just for sanity's sake.
Alright, get to use some of my new favorite tools.
Our air tools are working really well for me honestly.
I'm pretty stoked with how well that's gone or with how well they're actually suiting me and what I need.
But for anyone who's taking notes, these are all from the wood PC way back.
Those who really don't know the wood PC was actually the first case mod I literally ever did.
Yeah, the first fit I ever did was at work with a person from Germany and it was super fun.
But yeah, that was an absolute blast.
I should go close to this.
Yes, yes, yes.
This is going to be a tall glass of B. Roy Jenkins.
Okay, good enough.
Oh man, this thing's getting freaking heavy.
Particularly a fan of this, but you know, such as life.
Okay, I don't like how many metal shavings I put in there.
After a tremendous amount of jank, most of the holes cut out.
Time to see if it actually frickin fits because that's kind of the whole point.
All right, so my my gap here looks really big.
However, my gap here doesn't, which I'm just now realizing.
That's why.
Okay.
Well, that's kind of entertaining in a really sad way.
Frickin whoops.
I think I'm just going to go with it.
I think I'm just going to go with it and mount it sideways because it's going to be a lot easier to just leave it as is.
Then try to fix this gong show because I don't want a whole bunch of space around the breaker.
Because that means that you can go in and touch the frickin screws, which are, I'm pretty sure, not certain connected to the little frickin wires.
While it's on and closed, which I really don't want.
So, time to figure out how to mount the din rail to this in the wrong orientation, I guess.
Not ideal, but it'll work. Let's go into a little adventure of why I should have measured more times than I cut.
So initially, I looked at this hole right here and was like, oh, that's like perfect because it was one of the mounts originally for a piece that was right here and eventually went away.
So I cut it out bigger so I could use this nice little flat nut thing tube, whatever, can't remember the name of it, so it would actually fit in.
Unfortunately for me, we don't have any screws that are long enough to match.
So, okay, cool. Well, I guess I'm boned there.
I ended up doing more searching for a bunch of other longer bolts and we don't actually have any here that are M4.
So that's fun. I then drilled a lower hole here, which works perfectly and I can actually screw it in because the extra space from here to here actually lets this mate with the screw.
So that one works perfectly.
Came to the conclusion that, okay, cool, so I will need to put another hole up here.
Unfortunately, it was probably going to interfere with this weld, which would suck.
So I was like, okay, let's put it up as high and as close to this as we can, which works other than the fact this thing has a giant freaking lip on it.
So now I need to trim off part of this so it'll sit flat and I can actually screw into it.
The struggle is so real.
My goodness, made a sad realization just now.
Apparently, I didn't tighten the freaking nut on the bottom of this switch properly for at least this phase.
So it just fell off, which is kind of really bad.
I'm going to have to take this apart and access the bottom of this switch in order to resolve this.
Oh, I just had a big realization.
I should rotate this switch 90 degrees because then I can actually access all of the screw terminals.
Okay, I was going to see if I can just take this entire metal plate or metal like GPI PCIe bracket set out because I think I can if I just remove a bunch of these screws and I think this entire plate will just come off.
But with the sudden realization that I just had, I need to take this switch off again, which means taking all of the freaking screws and crap that holds it in.
Taking them all off, taking this entire thing out, rotating it 90 degrees so I can access all of the screw terminals all the time and then going again.
That will mean getting access to whatever side is on the bottom is going to suck.
Actually, right now I'm wishing I had mounted this higher up, but too little too late on that one.
So time for a little more time-lapse and a little more repeating work I've already done several times.
Woo! While I was tightening down all of these screws again just to make sure that nothing comes loose ever again because that would be really bad.
I cracked the switch. So I cracked the plastic housing on the back for the black phase, which is going to be one of the live phases.
So now it clicks around whenever I move the cable because it's no longer holding it strong, like it's no longer holding it properly anymore.
That's not ideal. Again, I think it's probably okay, but this is starting to get towards I only run one phase at a time and I just rewire it if I ever need to up how many phases I'm running.
So I think that might just kill this switch.
Probably remove this wire, the red phase entirely, and shift over the black phase, all of that wiring just for the sake of ease of reference.
I'll still run three phase out probably, actually.
Okay, I'm just going to use the red phase out entirely for now.
That's extra complication for the entire circuit.
So the screw is actually biting very well.
What actually happened was, so if I understand this correctly, this screw bites into this sheet piece of metal behind it, not into this plastic housing.
What actually cracked was as I was torquing this, this piece of bent metal goes into some of the internals, which means I probably need to check the status of this switch to see if it still works properly.
One second while I find some testing equipment.
So a nice multimeter, or a pretty good multimeter.
Flick 117, true RMS meter, but honestly it can use whatever the F needs to be used for this because it really just needs to tell me if this thing is still behaving as a switch.
It should. Being that it turns off when it's off and it turns on when it's on.
I need to find where I ended up putting the post.
Oh, it's in here. Oh yeah, it's attached.
Okay, so let's see what state it's in right now.
So, doot doot. Yeah, I know it's not perfect, but for what I'm doing it's fine.
These are both input terminals. So if anything is shorting, I have a very big problem.
No, thank goodness. That's very good news.
Okay, so that's shorting as I would expect.
And that and that perfect.
I don't want to make sure these aren't connected.
That would be really bad.
Okay, so far so reasonable.
One more little check-to-check to do first before saying it works.
Wow, that is really hard to turn.
Okay, so now it's in the other state which should have this two-phase power connected into the output side.
Essentially it just shorts these two, this side or this side, not both.
Again, continuity check.
Looks good, looks good, looks good.
Let's just do a little resistance check as well.
Just for completeness, 0.4.
That seems a little high.
0.2, that's fine.
0.2, that's actually marginally concerning.
Okay, yeah, that was 0.2 as well. And then I will swap it back and just check that the other side, the resistances on the other side are roughly comparable to that.
Okay, contact resistance, have mercy on me please.
So, 0, 0.
I need to go back and check the other side, 0.
Realistically what I was probably measuring was just, actually can you even see the multimeter?
Not really.
Sorry about that.
Okay, you probably can't read it, but just trust me.
So, what was probably the issue?
0.1, yeah, contact resistance.
0.1 and 0.1.
If you don't push hard enough, sometimes there's just a little bit of space and resistance in between the metal contact and the metal thing you're trying to measure.
And if you're measuring really small resistances, that can actually make a huge difference.
So, like if I don't press very hard at all, okay, well it's still low.
But let's see.
See how that, it's just jumping around a whole bunch. It's just, you want to make sure you're breaking through any like random oxide layers or gunk or whatever that's on the surface of your conductor.
If you're trying to measure resistance.
Unless you're trying to measure the resistance out of the gunk.
But that's a whole different ball game and honestly you probably shouldn't use a multimeter for that.
A better way to do that would be like an ESD tester or something like that where it generates a really high voltage and determines how quickly it breaks through and breaks down.
That's a much better way of trying to test like surface resistance rather than like actual resistance between metals.
But anyway, now that, oh, did I just tighten that down and then not have the, yes I did, okay.
So I'm just going to ignore the red phase because too much work.
At least out of the switch because I'm going to have to come back in here eventually regardless.
And I kind of just don't care enough.
Yeah, that one. Okay, so let's slap this down, ponder my life choices.
Do I just want to put that in? Yeah, I kind of do.
I'm just going to put this back in. So I managed to get this more or less wired up and connected to the input, albeit a little bit sketchily.
But you know, part of this isn't sketchy.
Also, I am not an electrician. Do not follow what I'm doing.
I am going to be the only one using this or I will be around whenever it is being used.
So if something decides to go wrong, I am the person who has wired it.
I will be around it and I will have more or less a solid idea of what to do if something decides to go horribly wrong or something disconnects.
I'm doing my best to be as safe as possible.
That's why I have some 16 amp breakers in here.
I plan to plug this into a 20 amp service, 20 amp 120 to start or 110 whatever lower power, lower voltage.
So this should trip before anything in the wall trips should anything upstream from here go wrong downstream from here go wrong.
Sorry. If anything upstream goes wrong, the breakers in the building should trip.
Obviously the plan is to never have that happen, but I'm planning on grounding everything as you should.
Making sure that the ground that comes in from either power service that's going to be running to here, whether the high power side or the low power side.
Those grounds are connected to the chassis, which is not ideal in general because that means I'm going to have two separate grounds.
They're connected together at this point creating a very large ground loop.
We'll see if I end up having to address that or not.
I may end up having to isolate the chassis ground on the power supply for the low power side from the high power.
I am connecting the high power ground to the chassis.
That is just happening. Technically speaking, it doesn't really matter which one is connected as long as one is, but I'm planning on connecting the high power ground to it just because I can.
So the next thing I need to do is this is my full list of bridge rectifiers.
So it's a three phase rectifier, takes three phase AC, connects it or pumps out DC from the AM minus and the KM plus.
So this thing is going to need some cooling.
I was debating using some other random heat sinks that I had, but I think this one is probably going to work the best as long as I make sure that the air flow path is flowing through this heat sink.
I don't believe this should overheat. If it does overheat in the long run, then, you know, I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
But for now, I need to drill some holes, make some connections here and then plop some thermal paste or thermal compound down in between this nice face here and this face here.
I'll probably rough this up as well just to kind of get rid of all of the bumps and nicks and crap that have built up on this over time.
And I'll bolt this down and make sure that the fins are in the direction of the main air flow, which I think is going to be either this direction or out here based on the fact that most of this back is currently solid.
And then I will figure out a way to mount this to the chassis itself.
While I was looking to try to mount this rectifier, I drilled a couple of holes, lined it all up. This all looks good.
I was looking at connecting it in. There were a couple of thoughts I had. One of them was tapping this piece of aluminum, but I really don't like that.
Aluminum threads are just, they work, but they're not great.
Another thought was just to have a nut on the back here and tighten it down from the top.
And then I had a dumb idea.
We have some heat set inserts that are designed to go into plastic.
We also have an arbor press. So I drilled out this hole a bit bigger than I would expect and the bottom of the heat set insert fits in.
So I'm going to try pressing it and quickly probably realize how stupid of an idea this is.
I'm going to put a nice little stop on the other side of here, just a piece of steel so it doesn't push through too far because it would, which I don't want.
I want it to press in a little bit. This is really dumb and probably not going to work.
But if it does work, heck yeah, bud.
We'll see. I may actually end up drilling this hole out even a little bit bigger because this is not looking like it's probably going to work.
But I'll try first and then fix it later.
It's not ideal. So I've got a couple blocks of aluminum.
Tactics, my stops.
And let's just get you a little closer into this adventure of horrible ideas.
In this episode, hoping that things don't go absolutely flying literally everywhere because there's a reasonable chance that this is going to fail hilariously and very not great.
Okay, so on the press.
Oh, yeah, that's not that's not happening.
Oh, wait.
Oh, wait, it bit.
Okay. Okay. Wow.
I'm a bit surprised.
Okay. Let me qualify that it bit a little.
Yeah, I can see where it where it actually bit into the aluminum.
So I'll give it another go just for kicks.
Because if this actually worked, that would be very entertaining.
The other option here is actually just to pull it through with an with a bolt.
And I may end up taking that approach if assuming if slash when this doesn't work.
Well, I'll be damned that actually kind of worked.
So it's about halfway through that part, which means I can give it another whack or two and it'll be well, I mean, it's permanently in there now.
Let's let's say that I don't want to undersell what just actually happened.
Yeah, that that that works.
That's entertaining.
Did not think that that would actually work.
Also, as I will say five bajillion times on this project, this is dumb.
There are way easier ways to do what I'm doing.
It's just fun.
Why am I doing this if not to have a hell of a good time messing around with Intel's money?
Thank you Intel for enabling my gong show.
That actually works.
That's dumb. So I just whacked the piece of aluminum with the ever press a whole bunch of times.
And I was like, oh, yeah, it's working super duper well.
Like I have the heat set inserts like embedded into the top surface of the aluminum.
Oh, it's the top surface of the aluminum that the side that the direct fire needs needs to connect to.
So in my excitement that it worked, I shot myself in the photo a little bit.
So I think I'm actually just going to toss this on the Tormach and just face this off.
So close, but yet so far. And now that I'm back with a freshly faced off area, whoops, so close, but yet so far.
This will actually meet relatively OK to this now.
The keen item on you might notice that the surface finish on this looks like poop.
That has nothing to do with the Tormach and everything to do with me being lazy.
So this part when I bandsawed it is not at all square.
So these two surfaces are not parallel to each other. So when I was clamping, it only actually held down like this part,
which means this was all floppy and while I was machining and I got a ton of chatter on here.
For this, it really doesn't matter. I'm probably going to rough this up with a bit of Scotch Brite anyway and then apply some thermal compound down.
But just in case anyone was wondering.
Now I'm starting to look at the gigantic capacitor and the IGBTs and how they're actually going to end up fitting in there
and coupling to each other because this cap needs to be connected to these two pins on both of these IGBTs.
There's also this cap here, which kind of just limits out and tries to eliminate as much inductance as possible on the quick switching
right when it engages so it can pump as much current as possible immediately.
I had a couple of thought issues.
So originally when I had cat it up the brackets to connect these together, I had it schemed.
So either this cap would be oriented like this or something like this or maybe like the IGBTs would be oriented up here or something.
Or sorry, up here or something like that.
But looking at the layout that I have in this case and how much height I have, that's just not going to work.
This cap is going to have to be located in this orientation.
Just an ideal but, you know, life.
Which means I have a couple of potential options.
The first of which is trying to bend some of the copper plate that I have.
So I ended up collecting this pre-bent piece of copper that's like a quarter of an inch thick or so.
I tried whacking it with a hammer to see if I could bend it anymore here and nothing happened at all.
So this is not going to be an option because we don't have, I don't have access to the equipment to try to bend copper this thick.
Certainly not this copper at least.
So this is out the door.
By extension and the other combination of flat into bend or into straight is going to be very difficult using purely copper.
Because I can't bend it.
But I had a realization that oh maybe, just maybe I can use these aluminum brackets that we have or that I have access to.
Mount those onto each pin and then maybe just maybe the height of the copper would line up and it pretty much does almost bang on.
So that's going to be my game plan is I need to cut down some of the hilarious piles of copper that I have collected.
Machine out some holes to connect these together and make sure they are point together.
Because the water block I bought for these is not that much bigger than these.
So I don't have a ton of space to fiddle around with for clearance between these.
And then I need to make the bars long enough that it extends out to about here.
Then I can mount. I may end up bolting this down.
But I also may end up just straight soldering the copper to the aluminum just because that's going to be a way better electrical and thermal connection.
Although in this particular location the thermal connection is kind of relevant.
But you know when I'm working with the power that I'm working with any kind of additional electrical resistance can actually make a really big difference to making things get ridiculously hot.
So I'm probably going to test out I'm going to test out trying to solder some aluminum like this to a piece of copper to see how much I hate myself trying to do it.
That's going to be a fun map gas experiment.
I'll probably end up taking this piece and trying to solder on one of these or something similar-ish to this just to see how that works out.
And I'll end up popping over to the welding bench and doing some fire brick shenanigans which will be good fun.
So off to that I go. Over to the welding bench.
I have some Scotch Brite just to rough up and clean up all the oxides that are on both the copper and on the aluminum to make sure that the solder has a reasonable chance of actually gripping.
This is somewhat a process that you really want to be thorough and make sure you've really cleaned everything within an inch of its life.
Otherwise you're going to not get a good bond at all.
So you can see that this is nice and shiny. This obviously not so much. This has been oxidizing for a very long time.
Now these naturally come to the best of my knowledge with a decent anodized layer on them which just, you know, in addition to natural oxidation which aluminum does it creates its own protective layer.
This has an additional anodization step that makes that oxide layer thicker.
And aluminum oxide specifically stuff that's used for anodization is actually really tough.
And it kind of has a little bit of a dull finish on it.
See if I can actually even operate it.
So I'm not having a ton of luck. I'm actually going to take this over to the belt grinder and hit it there.
Because I know that this will take it off.
This is a great way to show what I was talking about.
So you see how over here this is shiny. Like properly shiny. That's the bare aluminum metal.
Whereas this stuff here, this is aluminum oxide. Specifically this is likely anodized on.
And I'm pretty, I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess that the anodized layer might actually be harder than this scotch bright.
So it isn't able to break through it very easily.
But taking it to the belt grinder, it's a lot more abrasive.
And I think these are actually aluminum oxide sanding dis, sanding belts.
So this will take it off without too much difficulty.
So I'm going to take this back, take off the rest of this heavy oxide.
And then I'll touch it up with the scotch bright, give them both an alcohol wipe down and then start trying to solder this together.
Nice and shiny. So if I move this around in the light, it'll be shiny in different amounts depending on the orientation it's in.
That's just because I was taking different angles and different passes to make sure I got all the anodization off.
But now I'm going to rough it up a little bit more, make sure it's all nice and clean.
Make sure all of that oxidation is gone.
This little alcohol wipe. And then I'm moving this bottle of alcohol extraordinarily far away from me,
including this rag that I just doused in a hilariously flammable liquid right next to a torch and a hot brick
and all kinds of other things that are about to be extraordinarily high.
Oh yeah, so there's all the dust and grossness that came off of the copper.
Second pass is a lot more reasonable.
In terms of the aluminum, I've already kind of cleaned it once.
I'm fairly sure that it's purple, someone will probably correct me in the comments,
that isopropyl actually causes some kind of additional take off of material from aluminum,
because I've had times where I'm wiping aluminum down consistently and I'll consistently get a dirty colored rag when I'm doing it with isopropyl alcohol.
So, I don't know, some weirdness.
All right, this I'm fairly sure is flux, which will just make my life a lot less painful.
Sunshade just prevents oxidization while the two metals are really, really hot,
because as you heat something up, it will oxidize way faster.
If there's anyone who's ever seen very hot steel or any other very hot metal, they'll know.
And they can tell you that, oh boy, does it get an oxide layer real freaking fast.
Okay, now here comes the adventure part, because I don't know if this is going to work.
So I have some map gas, methyl, ath, acetyl, propane or something ridiculous like that.
I can't remember, I looked it up at one point.
It burns really hot.
Yeah, it burns really hot, so it should have no issue getting this thing hot enough to solder together.
I'm just using some plumbing lead-free solder.
I could easily use leaded solder, and honestly, it would make my life easier,
but I kind of just don't want to.
Lead, I'd just rather avoid it if I can.
So, let's see how well this goes.
For this, I want to heat up the bar, copper, and the aluminum part itself.
Okay, the box is starting to get liquid.
Okay, so that didn't work. The reason I can tell is as I was dragging that solder along the joint,
what I wanted it to do was I wanted it to pull in between the aluminum and the copper.
It did not do that, which likely means...
Oh, I should be doing this, probably, trying to do this sideways.
I didn't treat the surfaces well enough,
or potentially the solder is not good for copper to aluminum.
So this is like a silver solder, which I think should work, but who knows.
This is going to be disgustingly hot for a very long time,
so I'm probably just going to leave it for a while and come back and poke at it later.
Eventually, at a certain point, once it gets cool enough, I'll just dunk it in a thing of water,
because once I know all of the solder is solidified and everything,
honestly, dunking it in water in terms of the copper would actually help it needle it.
So that would probably not be a bad idea, regardless.
Then it'll make it a lot softer.
Ho! Great failure!
Alright, time for the quench.
Just for bits and giggles, I'll give you a nice from above view.
Let's see if this is even attached at all. Yeah, not even a little.
So this I'll just dunk in, because it's not going to be fun.
Copper.
So don't touch any of this crap.
After doing a bunch of testing on the driving portion of the circuitry,
I did some tests with our power supply up top,
and promptly realized it can put out nowhere near enough current to test the power side properly.
In my next step, I have taken a power cable and given it a snip to supply my input to my rectifier
and the rest of my power circuitry.
I have a nice variac right here that allows me to control what level of AC I put into this,
so I don't just hook this straight up to mains power.
Though still dangerous, is not quite as bad.
So I can control how much voltage is coming out of this machine and going into here and loading up this capacitor.
I have a tiny little discharge resistor as well, and I don't have any load on the output of this.
So this is just making sure that voltage is actually going in correctly,
and nothing really bad is going to happen.
But here we go.
First things first, some sanity check.
Measure what the AC voltage out of this bad boy is.
Zero. Let's go to like 30.
Let's go to 15.
Yeah. 15 in change.
It's reasonable. Power that off.
This is where the stress comes in, and now I do not get to touch anything moment.
Because as soon as I turn this on, this capacitor is going to be charged up.
And that is nothing to mess around with.
Okay.
I'm going to prove across the inputs here.
And these are good for a thousand volts, so I'm not too concerned.
But here we go.
It's up to 20 volts.
That seems about right. Do a quick power off.
And this is going to take like five minutes to discharge.
It's a good start.
A little more sanity check.
Once this switches on over to the DC side, it's not as concerning.
Obviously, high DC voltage, still very problematic.
These two components have a lot of power stored in them.
And not respecting that they have a lot of power stored in them is going to give you a very bad time.
And polarity is also correct.
So that is fantastic news.
And I just get to wait for that to discharge for a hot minute.
And next time you see me, I'll have the full circuitry later up in front for a full power test.
Now on to some moment of truth level shenanigans.
I have at least the starting version of the quote unquote full power test.
All of the circuitry is wired up.
I have the 15 volt supply going to this side.
But I just noticed that because my nice little heat sink that is keeping my gate drivers alive on this board just shifted at some point.
Put that back.
Because I can pretty much guarantee without that they will die.
Okay.
My frequency generation into my first stage gate drive into my second stage gate drive into the IGBT block,
which takes the AC power that comes out of this thing that my brain just refuses to remember the name of the transformer, auto transformer.
Goes through a three phase full project fire, which I'm all using two phases, which charges these two capacitors,
which then act as buffers for the IGBTs to pump through this toroid, which may or may not be good enough.
This may actually be the current bottleneck.
I then have that toroid coupled to the main loop.
No idea what the inductance of this thing is.
And honestly, I don't care as long if I can get anything out of this.
A plus super win.
And I will likely put this nice little welded cube I made forever ago when I was learning how to MIG.
In case you couldn't tell, I was not great.
Attacked as a heat load at some point. I'm not going to do that right off the bat because I don't want to load up the entire system on the very first attempt.
That's just begging for problems.
One thing I'm not totally sure about is the order of operations I really want to take here.
The thing I can do is just connect these grounds together and then connect these two probes to the ends of this copper pipe.
I mean, yeah, it's probably fine.
Keyword, probably fine.
Okay.
Oh, is that actually fine?
I don't know how high the voltage is going to get on this, so I'm actually not going to do that.
However, what I am going to do is I am going to probe the output of the IGBT to see if it has resolved.
If making the change I made has resolved the previous issue I had.
So long as these ground probes don't touch anything, I don't think it matters.
The only thing I'm actually going to care about is the math difference between them on the oscilloscope.
So as long as the two grounds are the same, it shouldn't cause any problems.
So I want this to be 15 volts, peak at two amps, whatever.
What do I want to turn on first? I will turn this on first.
And I want this to be in DC.
Okay, let's do some measurement.
Okay, let's go at this capacitor.
Nothing right now. Perfect. Good, good.
Promptly going up. Now at 20 volts DC, perfect.
And now let's power this on and see what happens.
Holy crap, something was vibrating.
What?
Okay, okay.
Is anything getting insanely hot?
Or did anything get insanely hot? 26 degrees.
That seems to have gotten warm very quickly.
Huh. Oh, kiroki.
So this is going to be a two-handed never now because I need to figure out what is actually going on.
So I'm going to do a quick power on, stop the probe on the oscilloscope,
and power it off again because that vibration is very strange.
And, you know, yeah.
That has got to be this coil.
What's my... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?
Ha, ha, ha, ha. Awesome.
Does that matter?
No, that's a 60 hertz wave that's not relevant for what I'm doing.
So...
And that's getting coupled from a nice ground loop I've created.
Awesome.
Okay, well, that's fun.
So I'm going to show you. Please, God, tell me I turned this on.
Okay. So this is what happens when you don't ground correctly.
I'm 95% sure this is a 60 hertz variation.
And those gigantic spikes are from the variations,
essentially from the ground loop that I've made with the probe tips.
So with the probe grounds, so these ones right here.
And the probes.
That has made this nice and fairly unreadable plot.
Mm, noisy.
Noisy, noisy, noisy. Okay, interesting.
Made a discovery.
So I kind of jumped when I turned on the main power,
sorry, when I turned on the gate driving circuitry
and had the main power, quote unquote, mains power running,
the AC power running. What I have just found out is what was actually creating
that lovely vibration noise is the auto transformer,
which is great because that means it's not my circuit. So that's awesome.
One thing I'm not sure about this instance is what is actually working
and what isn't. I think my next step is going to be probing across the coil here
with the multimeter.
That one, not that one, that gives all the pretty plots,
but this one, because it has a lot higher voltage survivability,
it can go up to a thousand volts and it will be fine, no problem.
Whereas that one is a lot more sensitive to higher voltages
and I do not know what the voltage in this is.
Because this is a resonance circuit, if I somehow miraculously hit the resonance of it,
the voltage could get very high and I don't want to blow up any of our measurement devices.
So I'll be probing with that bad boy.
That one. And then seeing what happens.
Okay, so I have all this stuff laid up. I want to do a little bit of fiddling around with the frequency
just to see how everything, to see if the voltage across these two things increases
and comes to a peak.
Yeah. So I'm going to probe across this.
I also learned that the oscilloscope is just not working.
For this use case, unfortunately,
that has mostly to do with the fact
that I'm getting a ton of common mode noise between the main,
this power circuit and the oscilloscope,
because they're running on different circuits and trying to probe this thing is just a nightmare.
Okay, so this thing is isolated.
So it measures, it can measure VAC without,
I think it can measure AC voltage without having a disgusting amount of common mode noise problems
unlike this oscilloscope, which just does.
And that's mostly my issue
and me not grounding correctly or not knowing how to ground correctly.
But let's try this.
Okay, so it's 85 millivolts.
Oh, wow, it peaks at like 160.
Uh, wait, what? Hey, hold on!
Hey, hold on!
There is smoke coming out of the variac.
That's bad.
Holy Shiza God,
that was drawing a lot of current. This cable is like very warm.
Killing it at 37 degrees, 30, 40 degrees.
45 degrees.
40 something degrees. So I think I may have just over-currented this,
which means that fuse in there is very not good
and does not work properly.
Okay, well, that's fun.
Okay, well, time for more seeing what the F's going on.
We're going to do some proper vlogging here. So I'm about to take out the fuse,
which is still extremely intact
and very much is still functioning as current as intended.
Clearly, this thing is not,
it's not spec'd correctly,
because it was literally smoking.
I have disconnected it from the wall, disconnected it from the power circuit.
This thing is just a giant coil,
so I'm not super concerned about it like,
like zapping me, but oh boy, is that ever spicy.
Did not think that was going to happen.
I expected one of these things to fry,
not the fricking variac.
My gosh, it's like pretty warm.
Interesting. I wonder if the fact that I was drawing at a low power,
a low voltage meant it was dumping a ton of current.
I don't actually remember how these things work. I've used them a couple of times,
but okay, time for some teardown.
A little bit more vlogging from teardown.
I took off this front panel.
Also, if anyone is ever actually deploying one of these things,
make sure you make some modifications to them
because the power cable is literally held in with hot glue.
That plastic sheath does nothing and there's zero strain relief on that power cable at all.
Also, I'm on the fence about if I think the power,
the cabling in here is actually rated high enough,
like thick enough gauge to run 20 amps through them.
That's very much a big question mark for me right now.
I'm not sure what was smoking.
How this actually works is back here,
you can see that black wire and it's bonded to one of the wires
around this gigantic toroid in the middle here.
You can see that it wraps all the way around it and it coils around this entire thing.
You can see this red wire right here. It connects right there to one of the other coils.
If I set the wiper, which is that little black thing
with the gold top, I'm just going to put this down.
That right there is what actually lets you determine
what voltage you want to set. It goes around and connects the output,
which is this yellow wire and goes to these two plugs,
to whatever the voltage you want is.
It can actually go above the voltage of the input
if you move it in this direction,
this direction relative to where this red wire is connected,
because that's 120 volts. This particular one I measured and it can go up to 145.
If you decided to go all the way up here, I was operating way down here, somewhere in that range.
I don't know what was smoking.
I have not been able to figure that out. My assumption was that it was either the connection
between the wiper and the tops of the copper,
or potentially some of the wiring in here, but I have not been able to identify what it was.
It could potentially also be the core,
but I would be very surprised if that was the case.
My current bet is it's something up top in there.
Maybe some of the wiring that ties it back to this block here,
or maybe something just got too hot.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if I'm going to use this again,
but that also means that the next power-on is going to be terrifying.
The next power-on is going to be at full power,
well, sorry, full power that I'm going to be using.
That potentially means that the next time I power this on
is going to be terrifying because it's going to be at 120 volts,
which is full power for the sake of this part, at least.
Eventually, I'll be pumping a lot more power through this, but that's once I'm more comfortable with the circuit and using it.
Everything seems to be rated for it and should be fine.
The only thing I'm unsure about is the toroid on the downside,
on the downstream of the edgy BTs.
That's something that's a big old question mark because I'm pretty sure the one I have is not going to work properly.
It's going to get saturated like nobody's freaking business,
and I'm going to have to source another one, which would suck. But maybe I'll just take this apart and use that gigantic toroid.
Who knows? Though this thing probably isn't designed for the frequencies I would use it for.
We'll see. I'll have to do some digging if that doesn't pan out,
but I think that's probably pretty much it for today.
I've hit a point of a little bit of full YOLO.
I am going to try plugging the power side just straight into the wall.
Everything here is rated for that voltage or way higher.
This capacitor is rated for up to 1500 volts.
This capacitor is rated up to 700 volts.
The two IGBTs are rated to 600 volts,
and this three phase Fulbridge rectifier is rated up to, I believe, 240 volts.
So I'm just going to send it.
But you're going to see it because if something decides to go kaputz,
it's probably going to be pretty spectacular.
And I'm actually going to move a little out of the way just in case.
So if it pops, it'll pop quick.
Okay, here we go.
No smoke.
No craziness. This is definitely at the point where I do not want to get anywhere near touching any of this.
This is now properly dangerous.
So this is a hundred and seventy volts DC.
And then the input is going to be something around 120-ish.
Heavy on the ish.
So I'm going to try turning on the power.
One second, please.
Well, that was fun.
So what happened? I took all of this beefcake circuitry, all of these caps, all this everything.
It charged up when I plugged it in. No problem.
Actually, it's plugged in again. I should very much turn that off.
What happened next was I turned on the gate control circuitry and I blew the breaker.
So that tells me I either have a dead short somewhere or this draws so much power.
And I probably need to load that heavier.
That that's just really bad.
Yeah, okay. Well, that's a fun learning experience.
I'm going to unplug that and make sure it's safe and then call it a day.
I just had a gargantuan RTFM moment.
So I was trying to troubleshoot why the heck I was maxing out power supplies, blowing breakers,
drawing just ridiculous amounts of current and seemingly getting literally nothing through the out of the IGBT block.
So I started poking around at it a little bit more and I realized I made a very poor assumption
and I was entirely incorrect with this assumption.
And the repercussions of that were that I was shorting directly through from the high side voltage straight to the return line.
Not going through the output at all or well, the output was still there,
but the resistance through the IGBT was so tiny that it was just bolting through that instead.
My realization came.
So in my circuitry and all my circuit diagrams,
I need to connect the gate reversed on one side to make sure that I don't have both of them on at the same time.
So I was looking at the pictures on the IGBTs and I saw, okay, cool, cool, cool.
So this is my collector one.
This is my emitter to this is my collector to an emitter one,
which essentially means this is the output in the middle.
This is the bottom and this is the top.
And I incorrectly assumed that each of these pins were what I thought they were.
Whereas in this was this pin was the emitter collector pin and this was the gate and this was the emitter pin and this was the gate.
My incorrect assumption. This is the gate.
This is the emitter. So while my circuit was turning on, whenever my gate driving circuit was turning on,
I was literally shorting the pins with power in and power out.
So that's a fun learning experience.
On the bright side, that means I can probably get this working today.
Good Lord. And we're back at it.
Everyone who's Uber turbo keen, although you probably can't see it from any of the angles I actually showed you,
all of these twists have heat shrink on them to indicate which side is which and also their different sized ferrules that I used.
I have switched these so they are hopefully correctly oriented this time.
I rebuild old circuit. I'm not going to power this off the wall this time.
For now, I'm going to start by using the bench power supply.
Powering this up with DC.
Essentially, none of this is actually connected.
It's not being used. It's connected, but it's not being used.
So I'll run this. I have a nice little IR thermometer just for shits and giggles to see if this thing gets hot.
And if it does, oh boy, are we getting somewhere.
But here we go. So power on running effectively no power.
So I have this energized at five volts.
So I'm not concerned about being near it. It's less.
It's less voltage than touching a nine volt. There's a lot more power here, but it's not going to get through my skin and power.
Okay. That's a lot better.
That's a ton better. So I turned on the driving circuitry and this only drew only only drew half an amp instead of 10.
Fantastic. That's amazing news for me.
That's not hot. That's not hot.
That's fine. That's fine. That's fine.
That's fine. Okay. Time to photograph some probes, I think.
I still have to figure out how the F I want to do this.
Do, do, do, do, do.
Let's grab these two just to start.
I want to connect the grounds together.
That shouldn't allow for any common noise, but obviously it totally will because I'm just being
dumb. Let's measure across the capacitor.
So what I definitely want to not want to not have happened is have these two ground connections.
Connections should connect to this because that would just be really bad.
Technically it should be isolated so it shouldn't cause any problems, but oh, do we ever know
that's not something I want to rely on in this circuit.
That would be terrifying. Okay. Here we go.
That's fun. Okay. I'm getting a little bit of movement, but really not very much.
Hang on.
Something I just thought about. I'm measuring the voltage across here.
The resistance in this circuit is very small.
Like very small, although the impedance is reasonable, but let's see.
What are we looking at here for the voltage?
We're looking at plus or minus a volt, roughly.
Yeah. Plus or minus about two volts.
Yeah. Okay. Which, given the input is five.
Sorry. Plus or minus one volt, total variation one volt, two volts.
That's not bad considering I've done literally zero tuning.
So let's turn that on again. Turn this on again and adjust the trigger.
How much power am I drawing?
That's probably fine. Where's my trigger?
What am I triggering on?
Oh, a channel that's not enabled. That's super smart.
Thanks, Keysight.
Why are you not triggering?
Hello. Thank you.
That looks much better. Okay.
Let's do some tuning. That did not change a damn thing, probably because my trigger is not working.
So it seems like this particular setup is resonating right around the top end of my potentiometers
range. And that is giving me almost a completely pure sine wave here, which is great.
That's what I want.
And the total voltage change is looking like one, like 1.6 volts.
It's really not very big.
Yeah. So it's like 1.6 volts.
Is it getting warm?
27. It's hot AF in here, by the way.
Is it getting warm? No.
28 degrees. 28 degrees.
Oh, that's thirsty.
52.
That's a little uncomfortable with the warm.
So that's going to need active cooling. Sure.
For sure.
I could probably run this off the wall now.
I'm not going to yet.
I want to get active cooling for this first.
I'll bump it up to 6 volts just because I can.
Run this.
Okay. Stop that.
1.25 amps. Damn, that's toasty.
Whoo. 52 degrees, bud.
That's hot. How about this?
Oh, yeah, I should not touch that cap. Actually, it's 6 volts is fine.
These things are fine. They're barely warm.
They're barely warmer than this room.
Which isn't saying much because the room's hot as heck.
Let's just turn that on. Okay.
Um...
So I'm getting plus or minus some volts. Whistling.
Oh.
Head full cap to the bottom. Head to the bottom.
Head to the bottom.
I'm starting to wrap up the coils or the singular coil at this point
for the actual work side of the...
I'm wrapping up the coil for the work...
I started wrapping up the work coil and I was using this nice little like
push-in adapter for PVC pipes to a corrugated pipe.
And then I was...
It's kind of a pain in the butt because of all of these lips getting the coil wrapped around it
and then getting it off. It's kind of a pain in the ass.
And I promptly realized our nice water bottles from lttstore.com, this is an old one,
but are about 3.5 inches in diameter,
which is pretty much exactly what I'm looking for. So I can just wrap it around that instead.
Yay! That's very convenient for me because this is straight
and I can get the tube off no problem unlike the corrugated connector
which is a gigantic pain in the butt. That was a fun little workout.
This tube is... This coil is a little...
Actually better than I thought it was going to turn out.
We're going to have to compress it down a little bit and make sure that all of these individual pipes
are isolated. So when I put barbed steel
or whatever else I put in here, it doesn't short between each of the coils,
which wouldn't be that... It would not be good.
It wouldn't be that bad because copper is super conductive so it's not going to make anything like really, really bad,
but ideally I would not have any of this
able to be electrically contacted with something.
Obviously you can touch it, which is still not great.
It shouldn't be that hot because of the water running through it,
but yeah, this is definitely not something
to accidentally hit because there's going to be a lot of voltage
and power in it. Though it should be isolated from everything,
so it shouldn't be that bad. It's still not something that you would want to touch.
Certainly not unintentionally. But yeah, that wasn't actually too bad.
I have starting here three, four, five, six and a half
turns I need seven and a half.
Okay. I can do basic math sometimes.
There we go. Seven and a half turns.
So that gives me what I'm looking for.
And then according to my math, I'm looking for a total length of this coil
of about six inches.
I'm pretty sure this is a little bigger, but it'll be a good place to start.
Oh no, actually, this is like bang on six and a half inches, so I'll take it down a little bit probably
because if I really check some math,
that would make it, and it's probably fine.
It probably doesn't matter.
Next up, chopping some stuff,
figuring out how to connect this
to the actual capacitor
with the help of a couple of these. And then I need to get the coupling toroid
around the capacitor side of these,
so that these are small enough that I can just take it off if I need to.
So that's very nice. I'm going to leave this one side a little longer
just to allow myself, if I need to,
to bend in to connect to the other compression fitting
because I'm pretty sure those are only three and a half inches apart.
So I have that option.
Nice, and then that will fit on something
like a little pressed slash mangled,
but that'll fit something like that. It will compress down,
but I'll show you a little more detail on how that actually works. Want to do it?
Yay, getting there. In front of me sits a lot of things
that I'm going to have to put together before I am done here.
Extra tubing, extra tubing for who the heck knows what reason.
I'll probably end up making a smaller diameter
work coil eventually, but that's going to be a later endeavor for sure.
So that can just chill. So I have a nice deburring tool.
I have a pipe cutter, and then I have some swage lock fittings.
These are brass and designed for relatively soft materials,
or at least these swages are designed
for relatively soft materials. These ones in particular for copper.
How it actually works is you put the nut over your pipe,
you put the two swages over top as well,
and then the inside of these connections has a taper on it that kind of lines up with this.
What happens is that taper compresses against here,
and then the nut tightens these together
and squishes this inner intersection into here,
compressing it, holding the copper pipe,
and it actually compresses the copper pipe as well. So this is a permanent fixture,
which also means you can't get this nut off ever
without cutting it or somehow pulling the swage off.
That's why I have a couple of extra nuts kicking around, as well as a couple of extra swage sets,
so I can have multiple work coils
if I need them for different use cases.
But before I do that, after you use this pipe cutter,
the inside of the pipe is really sharp and jagged,
and in some situations the outside even has a lip on it
that you need to take down. So I have this deburring tool that I'll use
to clean up the insides of these.
Unfortunately, which I may end up regretting later,
I may have actually sandblasted the copper pipe here.
So I sandblasted the copper pipe here
when I was cleaning up after brazing,
and that's going to suck,
because that might mean that these swage fittings won't work.
I will have to test that and hope.
But I'll end up probably trimming both of these down
to be in line with each other, swaging the fittings on here.
Maybe I'll leave it a little bit longer, actually, because I need to have the matching coil on it.
So I'll leave it a little bit longer, probably cut it somewhere around here or something like that,
just to get rid of this really bad section, or maybe I'll use this side.
I haven't figured that out yet. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
I'll cut it off, trim the insides, and then do the swage fittings.
But yeah, up until that point, this is going to be very interesting,
because it's just going to be a lot of cutting copper pipe. Back out in the shop where we have all of the tools,
instead of just a couple of the tools, I can create a warehouse for the time being.
So I've recollected everything I needed, including a couple of wrenches.
These particular swage lock fittings use half-inch for this smaller central piece.
And then what is it, 9-16ths?
9-16ths for the bigger side. So grab both of those because you need both.
And now I get to just do a little bit of copper pipe treatments.
So earlier on, I had used a slightly smaller,
well, slightly, a non-trivial smaller pipe cutter.
I ended up switching to this bigger one because it's newer.
It has a fresher blade. I know you can just replace the blades from them.
But, you know, I'm here on the weekend. And no one's here, no one's here.
Because I like random projects that scope is way too big.
But it's fun. I like pushing myself to learn.
And also applying skills I've learned in different ways,
which is just fun too.
One other thing I learned. So when I braised these two pieces,
I thought I was very smart in my orientation.
I put them both flat down and braised it, soldered, whatever.
So the long pipes were on the same sides.
Being a little bit of a dingus,
forgetting of the fact that in order to connect them to the capacitor,
you have to flip them around so the two different lengths are different.
The two longer sides are on opposite ends.
Conveniently, I can flip one of them over
and just go to this other hole that already existed.
And that more or less makes it line up. So I can actually have the long sides that I didn't sandblast together.
Ah, details. I still have to shorten up one of these sides, unfortunately.
Wow, okay, half two is a strong word. I probably actually won't because I think this is an end of the copper roll.
I don't really want to cut it down and then retreat the outsides
just because it's a pain in the butt. So I may actually just leave it
and have one of the copper shifted like this.
Ah, sorry, no.
Like that. Haha, yes, like that.
The holes are almost lined up, but not quite.
So there'll be a little bit of an offset, but this has an offset, so whatever.
That's fine. So next step, do some swaging.
Alright, so as I had mentioned prior, you have four parts, four pieces,
not including the tube. Hold on.
They make this happen. For this type, there are other types where it's just one inner piece,
but these are the ones that I have. So you have the two inner pieces that go in.
You have your nut and you have the connection, or in this case, the union.
So I'll more or less tighten it down, hand tight.
So put it on. Step one. Step two, hand tighten it until it's like reasonably tight.
There's still some a little bit of movement in the fitting.
So normally Swagelock has standardized fitting procedures for these things
to allow you to continually reuse them with only slight tightening,
slight additional tightening steps. So for these, I'm going to go a little bit overboard with how much I'm tightening it down.
Not for this particular one, just because I'm going to be taking it apart to show you what happens
when I do it, but if I recall correctly, you're supposed to mark where it lines up
and then you tighten it down a particular amount for each tightening
and each removal and reattachment of the joint.
I'll go start with half just because that should be more than enough to make this wage engage.
So now undo it and if things have gone well,
well, they didn't go well. So that's fun.
Okay. Well, that didn't behave as I wanted it to.
Okay.
Time to try again. This copper pipe might actually be a little thin for this,
but at the moment, I don't have another option.
So it's going to be what I'm doing.
Let's skip it.
Three quarters of a turn roughly.
Okay. Now I'll loosen it off.
Okay. So yeah, that was really easy comparatively.
That should mean.
Okay. It's still pretty loose, but now this is attached to this part.
This copper pipe is definitely a little bit thin for this particular process.
But oh well, such as life. You can see that it's actually bulging here.
That's not great.
That probably just means I put the pipe too far back, whatever.
That's not the end of the world.
So let's clamp this down again.
And in general, every time you reattach, you have to tighten it more
to make sure you actually get a good seal. Eventually I will actually pressure test this.
Pretty sure these copper fittings aren't going to be where things leak.
Also, if I was actually doing this properly and it mattered,
it doesn't matter here. There's a little bit of water leakage.
I can just tighten it down more later. I'd be properly following the guidelines, treating all of the pipes correctly,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But for this, it doesn't matter.
All right, next one.
Same steps. Put it on.
Tighten her down.
Okay, here I'll go again a little more than three quarters of a turn.
That's not going anywhere.
Primo. So now I have my two fittings that are connected and not even remotely straight,
but it doesn't matter because it's not connecting to anything even remotely straight.
I get to reconnect all of these two plates to the cap.
And of course, that's coming in.
All right, so this one goes this direction.
It's going to go hand tight for right now, and then I'll roughly line them up.
And this one has to go the opposite direction because, ha, details.
I will, after having to change my pants, take these two plates down to the same size,
eventually, just for ease of use.
I'm going to rest these on top of some plastic just to give isolation for the time being,
but eventually I want these two copper plates to be appropriately dimensioned.
Okay, tighten that bad boy down.
Get that roughly aligned.
Very much on the roughly...
Okay, cool.
So now it's going to sit super wank, super jank, super wankily-dankily.
Wow, okay, let's not include that.
Winga, winga, winga, winga, tell us the weekend.
Okay, my next problem. I have my two connections right here.
Then I have the two sides of the coil.
Hey, big shocker, they don't line up even remotely.
There are a couple of different ways to resolve this problem.
But realistically, how I'm going to solve this problem is with some jank pipe bending
lots of hope that I don't break the coil
because I don't really have enough free material to make another one.
Yay! So I'm going to make a couple of modifications.
One of them is I want to bend this pipe in a little,
and this one's going to have to probably come in and then straighten out over here or something like that.
I haven't exactly ironed out what this is going to be, and it's honestly going to be a lot of like,
hey, rule of thumbing it to ... eyeballing the crap out of it to see how it works.
Thankfully working with soft, annealed copper tubing, very easy.
I can just do it by hand. I just have to avoid crushing it because that's a thing you can do with copper tubing,
is hulk too much and just crush it.
Ha, whoops, ask me how I know. I've already done it once.
Whoops!
This is really annoying.
Okay, so realistically this is going to have to bend down,
come into here, and then straighten out and go in.
This might actually even be too long.
But, I'll grab the bender.
I'm going to try using this bender once.
Chances are I'm not going to use it after that.
I recall watching a Linus and I think a Jake struggle epically with this thing when they were using it.
For some, if I think it was for a hardline copper tubing video.
Which, haha, copper tubing, hardlining.
That's totally not something Linus is going to hate me for later.
Boilers, if you didn't actually watch my actual upgrade.
Yeah, that was probably a mistake.
I don't actually know how it went yet, because it hasn't happened.
I'm pretty sure the answer is not well.
Wow, this is really, really, really, really, really awkward to use.
Holy moly.
Okay, that's cool, I guess.
Okay, sure.
That didn't do even remotely what I wanted.
Because I want this to sit horizontal, I think.
I need to bend this up.
Oh god, that was literally the wrong, completely wrong bend.
That's unfortunate, thankfully.
Soft and yield copper. Yeah buddy, not straight, but it doesn't matter.
So let's just do one of these then.
I should have...
Dang it, I don't have my LTT water bottle that I used as a form.
Because I could, and it worked actually really, really, really, really well.
Okay, so that's that bend.
That gets it roughly in line this direction, which is nice.
Then I just have to do one of these. Oh my god.
Oh please.
That's mercy. That's mercy.
This is where I learned all the regrets that I'm about to have.
Okay, holy moly.
Okay. Lord, that was awful.
But it almost worked. That's entertaining.
I'm going to flip it over because I've essentially lined it up to be that now.
Wow, that went much better than I expected.
So I need a little more bend here. Oh god.
It's fine.
It's fine. It's fine.
I definitely didn't crush the tube a bit.
Okay, so that's actually really, really, really, really close.
So I have this fitting to there. And then this one just needs to straighten it out down here.
Holy moly, that's a sharp bend, which is not great.
Maybe.
No, I need to bend it down more.
It's getting there.
How's that? That's actually probably close enough.
Yeah, that'll do. Okay, now I just have to cut this down and then do some jank.
So I'll cut it like there.
Whee! More pipe cutting.
Oh, this is going to suck now. That's really shitty.
The reason this is going to suck now. Oh, never mind.
I cleared it because the two pipes aren't parallel.
Thankfully it doesn't matter because soft copper is soft and I can just make it work.
There it goes.
Okay. A little bit of deburring.
Okay. Okay.
Wow, that actually worked. Holy moly.
I have a coil! It's not straight.
It's straight when the capacitor is sideways. That's fine.
I can fix that later. That's a low priority problem.
Alright, hand tight.
Hand tight. And then just for the sake of consistency, I know there is a correct way.
And it's nowhere near as much as I'm doing it. I don't care.
Let's go to three quarter.
Perfect.
I'm only going to do this one to half. Because in order to test this, I need to put a matching transformer on it.
Which means I need to take one of these off. Ha!
So close. But wait, I actually might...
No, I shouldn't take both off. That's fine.
That doesn't mean I'm taking these... These screws.
Wrenches. With me.
Good enough.
Neither of those are going anywhere. Good, good, good.
Taking these with me. I should not need any more stuff.
In terms of the cutting or the bending or the blah, blah, blah.
Because all of the other connections on this setup are going to be plastic.
Because I don't want to short this to everything else. That would be very bad.
I've gotten everything assembled together. And this is where things start getting a little scary.
So... Nope.
I have my first driver circuit.
Powering the second driver circuit. Going into the IGBT blocks.
Which takes power through this full board rectifier.
I have a nice current clamp. Which can give me a current reading times ten.
On that. I also have another meter for voltage.
And I have a variac. So I can drop what the voltage going into this is.
So I'm not going at 120 or half the bat. After that it goes into this.
I have a nice capacitor here. And then the outputs of this go into this driving toroid.
Which is probably not great. And that couples to the work coil and the tank capacitor.
So that's all set up and fun.
Now for the glorious time. I'm turning the freaking thing on.
So first off.
Watching the current. As I turn on the variac.
It's going to peak and then come back down. That is just from charging this capacitor.
I believe at this particular juncture.
That variac is at about 70 volts. I'm currently set to DC.
So probing across that. I'm looking at a nice 77 volts DC.
Okay. I then have turned that off for this.
This is the power supply for the driving circuits.
So when I turn that on. The thing to watch is that number right there.
And to see if the variac starts smoking again.
Holy crap.
Okay. I am fairly sure that was the variac.
And if that current clamp is correct. I was drawing 22 amps.
Somehow. That should have blown a long list of breakers.
Or safeties. Number one.
With that freaking fuse. Which is clearly not doing a damn thing.
Okay. Okay then.
If that wasn't actually about to vibrate off of the freaking table.
I would have done some more testing. But at the moment I kind of can't.
Just do a little bit of measuring. That's not too hot.
That's relatively warm.
That's fine. That's fine.
That's fine. Very not clean.
Not. Seems to not be too hot.
But. Troubleshooting to follow.
Now's the time to actually start assembling everything together.
And quite possibly in the case too. I made a couple of realizations here and there.
Through some testing. Number one.
The driving coil. The coupling transformer between the driving circuit.
Or the power circuit. And the work tank.
I pretty much shorted it. Not actually but I was running.
According to the impedance of it. I was running probably north of like 30 amps.
Through it at peak. I think some breakers in testing.
I swapped it out. Swapped out the cable.
Which I might have somewhere. I swapped out the thinner gauge cable that I used for testing.
With my six gauge super chonker wire.
I crimped on some nice beef cake terminals.
Terminations on the two ends. And I wound this up so it shouldn't overdraw current.
While still powering this with plenty of room to spare.
I also have a water cooling setup. Because now that I'm actually looking at doing full power tests.
This work coil is going to heat up really fast.
Though it only has like .08 of an O or something insane like that.
When you're running hundreds of amps through it.
That still adds up really fast to a lot of power.
So I need to actually water cool stuff. Where things are going to start having big problems.
I'm also going to swap to my nice little janktastic power supply.
That has given it's life for this project.
To drive the driving circuitry.
And I have our nice 240 to 120 adapter power cable.
Which we don't use for anything. Because it's really unsafe.
So explicitly use it. Because you know you need to use it.
Now I'm going to go to a bunch of putting stuff together.
And I'll talk to you when everything's assembled. Everything's all hooked up.
Now I get to do a quick leak check.
Because I don't trust this.
And I don't trust this.
Alright now it's time to do a leak check. After hooking everything up.
Out of the case.
I trust these fittings over here. On the water on the res.
I do not trust these in the slightest. So I have a nice little catch underneath.
Just in case it leaks. And then I don't really trust these wage lock fittings on these pipes.
I feel like the soft copper is too soft. For these to work properly.
So these very well may leak. And I may have to swap these out for something else.
Across that bridge if I have to. I'm hoping I won't.
But I definitely want to leak check. Before I go and put like hundreds of volts across here.
And then have water leaking. Because that's just begging for a tremendous disaster.
But now I get to have the adventure of actually making it happen.
Alright.
This bad boy up.
Actually going to disconnect.
These PCIe plugs.
Come in. There you go. And plug in a little more leaks.
Conveniently this power supply is old enough that it still has that.
Okay.
Go.
I guess that hole is actually small enough that I will use the proper filler.
Okay.
I likely will not have to top this up.
I think the volume of this loop is small enough that I don't have to care.
Okay. Conveniently I also have a nice little thumb switch for this power supply.
But here we go.
Turned off the power supply. Here we go again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And off. So far so good.
Nothing is immediately leaking.
That's a win. There's also very little resistance in this loop overall with the power of this pump.
So that's playing to my benefit as well.
All right. I'm going to cap this in case this decides to tip itself over in classic.
If anything go wrong, can go in there. I'm just going to cap this off just in case in classic Murphy's Law fashion,
anything that's going to go wrong will go wrong.
Pump this on that one more time. Just let it run for a bit.
In the long run, I'll likely put one of the return up here.
So I will hopefully be able to actually drain the loop so I can swap the coil out.
That looks pretty good. Okay.
Nothing is leaking.
Parimo. Okay. This is now a very much safety glasses and do not try at home territory.
Take everything, plug it all in.
Before I do that, just going to remove everything metal from close by.
These are very much not voltage rated, but they're better than nothing.
I know they're not voltage rated.
So it will not act as though they are.
We have the gas, people over clubs. Again, not ESD rated.
And I'm not going to treat them like they are.
But for the first time I'm setting this up, it is better than nothing.
So welding glove inside butyl rubber glove is going to be the best I'm going to get.
I'm going to actually get the other hand. I have now made it so the power supply will stay on.
So I will likely do control of the overall system from the variac.
So that's the power on the power side.
At four amps.
Yeah, that's like workable.
That's four amps at probably about 20 volts DC-ish or 15 volts AC.
So let's hit it.
Hit it. Okay.
Nothing. Right. Didn't turn on the current line.
That's right.
Okay. Let's turn that off.
Re-zero this.
Right. Didn't turn on the power supply.
Driving circuitry is on. Variac is on.
Four amps. Primo.
Primo. Perfect. Awesome.
So it's only drawing two amps now because putting the steel bar in loads the work coil more.
I'm just going to let this sit for a bit. It's warm.
Heck yeah bud.
Heck yeah bud. Okay.
Let's do a little more. So this thing is definitely not rated for anywhere near 20 amps.
Because it's already starting to sound unhappy. Let's do the thing.
Holy crap. Yeah, that's hot.
Not burning you hot, but uncomfortable to touch hot.
Ha ha ha.
It does the thing.
Heck yeah buddy. Kind of want to try to heat something up enough that you can see it.
This is too, probably a little too thick.
Okay. This is probably some grade of stainless.
Yeah, it's already pulled down quite a bit. So I'll stick this in.
Oh, it's still going. No, that's not smart, but whatever.
Ha. So that does pretty much nothing.
Conveniently the IGBT blocks are not very hot.
But that's probably because they're just hilariously under their rated spec right now.
This is operating at maybe 30 volts or 40 volts.
Yeah, it's hot, but this is not really for a magnetic.
So it doesn't heat up nearly as quickly. All right, let's go back to the bar.
And this is well below what this setup can handle.
Especially now that I've water cooled the coil.
Other than the fact that the variac is buzzing like nobody's fricking business.
This thing can handle way more power.
So the metal is starting to discolor from it being so hot that it's oxidizing.
This is now no longer in touch test territory.
Yeah, so that's really hot.
I'm not touching that. There is zero chance in heck that I am touching that.
It smells hot, a little hot.
So that's fun. It works.
That was at 40 volts.
And this thing should be able to handle with no problem.
200 on the input.
This is going to be fun because that'll heat up really fast.
Just for just for kicks.
Everything should be safe now. I drained it.
I disconnected the thing.
I discharged it. Heck yeah buddy.
Okay, sick. Now my job is to fit this into the box.
Sorry for the hilariously shaky hand.
Found a couple of issues at the case.
And made a couple of parts that I realized are just not going to work in the slightest.
I cut out a couple of nice little sheets to act as fronts for in here.
That would go in here, hold these pipes in place and would work all hunky-dory.
But then I realized I wanted to be able to have these fully inside the case with this closed.
So these do literally nothing.
I'm going to have to swap these out and have some mounts on here instead,
which is just a little bit further back on this piece here instead of this front piece.
Second, I swapped which side these Molex power cables are for the fans.
This side is going to be really busy anyway.
This side is going to be really busy anyway. And honestly, I just don't want to have more stuff over here.
Third, I'm going to have to shorten those copper tubes, which is rather unfortunate.
I'm likely going to shorten both sides.
I'll probably cut it off around here on this side and then probably just shorten this up just a touch.
So I can have the capacitor sitting much closer to the front have enough room to run the tubes down and underneath this fan.
So I can have all three fans populated just to give myself some extra headroom for lots of power later if I need it.
But this is the very, very empty case.
It's good fun. There's going to be a couple more holes chopped into the front.
I'm going to open that up a ton for more airflow like we remove that center acrylic piece and install a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
And there is everything that's going to have to go in here.
I think one of the Starbucks cups.
Oh yeah, I also took those covers off from here because all I don't need them.
Anyway, so you'll lighter in case anyone was ever curious who hasn't worked with switch lock fittings before.
These compression parts do actually shrink when you crush it.
So the inner diameter of these holes reduced by a non-trivial fraction, which means I did some things that you definitely shouldn't do like hammer these pieces on to the copper tube to get it to fit again.
Ha! This is going to be a tall glass of things not to do at home.
Let's just ignore the horrific, horrific, horrific, awful things that I've done to this poor power supply.
I will make it significantly less gross eventually, but right now I just needed to get rid of a ton of cabling because I thought I didn't have a lot of space.
Turns out I kind of do.
I might actually be able to fit the gigantic capacitor in this just for shits and giggles because I can.
We'll see. But back here is going to be all of the cooling, all of the water cooling runs, as well as the power inputs.
So this is going to be the main power for the high power side.
Goes into the switch, which goes into these breakers, which may or may not be high rated enough.
I have to do some math.
Goes out of the breakers into the three-phase full-bridge rectifier, which then is going to have to run underneath this chonk-tastic rad.
This fan and connect up here to the two bus bars on the inverter block.
I may end up plonking the humongous cap right here just for kicks if I can, if not, whatever.
But this is, yeah, so the inverter blocks here, that's going to be connected to these two caps unless I can fit the gigantic one in the back.
I have my two driving boards.
These very well may get moved over here.
I may end up shifting some stuff around just so I have more space to work with and extending these connections for the output of this board.
It goes into the inverter block.
Then I have my high power cap with the coupling toroid.
I'm almost certainly going to have to rewind this.
It's just too loose and with the amount of space I have in that area, all of this extra space is actually hurting me quite a bit.
Turns out I shot myself in the foot kind of aggressively and I cut these tubes really short.
So it's actually difficult to get this coupling transformer around the tubes.
Ha ha, whoops, let me learn.
Once that's set up, then the whatever work coil I'm using will connect onto these and that's the electronic side.
Then onto the water cooling side, I have Le Pomp, the gigantic, not res.
I have Le Pomp, the super thick boy Ikea rad.
I have the capacitor line or the capacitor loop, which obviously is open right now because the coil needs to be on it.
Then I have the inverter block loop.
My current thought is I want to make sure that that cap doesn't get too hot because it is expensive and difficult to source.
Everything else in here is much easier to replace, so I want to make sure that that stays cool enough.
So my plan is output of RAT, one of those I have yet, for computer devices.
The temperature drop across the radiator is generally speaking quite small and the temperature of your entire loop will be essentially equal.
For this, because I'm working in bursts, the order that I put the parts in actually matters or can matter.
So I want to have my most critical or my most temperature sensitive parts first and then continue down the chain.
So first thing is the cap, but that's going to be the output of the radiator.
So output of the radiator is going to go at the input of the capacitor loop.
The output of the capacitor loop is going to go to either the input of the inverter block loop or potentially the pump.
I haven't decided yet. And then the output of the pump is going to go either to this.
Well, yeah, in the case that the capacitor connects directly to the pump, the output of the pump goes to the inverter block.
The output of the inverter block goes back into the rad or you flip the pump and the inverter block.
We'll see, but it's coming together.
Holy crap. I still have a whole bunch of stuff to do up here.
I have to remove a whole bunch of this material, this metal.
I also have to put in a nice little power switch for actually turning on this circuit.
And then I have fairly easy access to this potentiometer.
I may end up desoldering this particular pot like this, this physical pot and reconnecting it to the front right beside the switch so I can adjust the frequency on the fly.
I will also still have, I also want to mount this bad boy to the front as well so I can read it, read out how much power is going into the system.
I'm not sure exactly where this is going to, this is going to end up yet because unfortunately I'm going to have to get this or that part right there.
So there's going to be some non-trivial wiring runs for that, but I think it's not pulling very much power so it doesn't matter too, too much.
I love it when a plan starts coming together. This is starting to actually look legit, which let's say I am a list-ducked, but it's coming together.
Hell yeah. Oh, late night. I will see you another day whenever I can find more time to actually finish this monster of a project.
I just experienced a couple of iterations of, oh yeah, right, if you're flipping something over, it's not necessarily the same.
But I started off having this as my capacitor holder.
It's just not great for a lot of reasons.
The sizing and the tolerances on all of these parts are just not good and the layer lines for the 3D prints are actually like scratching away at the paper on the capacitor.
So these, no bueno, also they're two separate parts, which was kind of nice for modularity and the ability to try to clamp it sideways, but that just didn't work out.
And I decided that I was only going to put two holes in the actual box itself.
So I redesigned it to be something like this.
So it'll sit, hopefully, nice and in there.
Have a little bit of wibble wobble, but I can put a top on it, clamp it down, Bob's your uncle good to go.
But when I went to make it, I made the bottom piece. This is not symmetric.
And this bottom piece printed off really well. It looks really good.
I printed the top piece at the same time. It looks great.
Except I, to make this, I just chopped the bottom off, which means the holes line up this way.
But when I go to put them together, the holes don't line up.
So I get to remake the top part because face palm, but it's nothing too bad.
I'm also going to, you know, make some additional chamfers and fillets to round off all of these edges on the outside of this part.
But that's on the printers right now. And once that's done, I'll get this together.
Also, this does fit onto the holes that I've made.
Other detail, I forgot to add chamfers to the bottoms of these holes.
So I'm going to get to do that in a sketchy fashion, let's say, but you'll get to see that soon.
Came up with several different ways to try to do this in varying levels of takes forever and sketchy.
This is kind of in the middle, more towards the sketchy side.
Just adding a nice little chamfer on the bottom. It'll be fine.
Famous last words, if ever have I said them.
Oh, right.
That actually works super well.
Nice little chamfer. Now this one's going to be a little more spicy except to move it along the cut.
But yeah, good.
Now it's as good a time as any to get to try.
Well, it's definitely not pretty, but that'll do.
Only doing this one time because after I do it once, it's not going to be as exciting.
So I know what's going to happen.
I have my variac plugged into a wall outlet.
The output of which is getting measured by a multimeter and also the full system through this little beast here.
This probably won't turn on until like 60 volts.
I'm guessing based on the ones I've used in the past.
In here, I have several layers of switching and power and stuff.
So the inlet from the variac or a wall outlet or whatever I'm putting into the system goes through this chunky switch contactor.
That contactor then goes through a breaker, which is rated, I believe at 16 amps.
I'm probably going to have to change it out at some point, but that's a later problem.
And then it goes into the actual system through direct fire and everything else.
These two are the first two main power on devices.
So I'm going to start with this off just to make sure that nothing crazy is happening.
And I'll start the variac very low, probably go up to about 80 to maybe 100 volts DC or AC.
And then I'll go back down, turn up, hit the switch and then start loading the whole system.
I'm not turning on the driving circuitry because I don't even have the work coil in here.
And I just don't want to mess with that. So safety glasses because some weirdness might happen.
That's fine. Don't worry about it. Okay, so power on.
So I'm getting like half of all AC, so pretty much nothing.
And just as a quick sanity check, let's go up to like 30.
Good enough. I want to measure in here.
Nothing perfect. So that means the contractor works as it should.
But you know, you'd rather check going to turn this back down.
And I'm going to hit the contractor to be on.
This is now hot. Okay.
Oh, let's see when this little bugger turns on.
Oh, okay.
That was unexpected.
This started vibrating right away, which I was definitely not expecting.
Something is not right. Okay. Time to do a little bit of measuring because something's not behaving.
0.3 volts there. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.
Back at it again. I have now disconnected the coupling trolley because I have a sneaking suspicion that without a controlling signal coming from the driving circuits for the inverter block, it might try to be trying to short out through this coil.
So I'm just going to try disconnecting that entirely.
And then I will repeat what I have done before.
This time I'm actually just going to be measuring the DC side rather than the AC side because I already have a measurement on the AC side here after 45 volts.
So let's give her another little send.
Okay. So effectively nothing.
I don't like that because...
Yeah, that voltage drops way too fast.
Okay.
I guess I get to power the supply now.
I would rather not.
On the right side, I have a nice power switch to not drive the circuitry.
And also, if all else fails, I don't even have a work coil connected.
So nothing too, too bad should happen.
Okay. So let's hit this.
Okay, that fan just like cranks it.
But I'm wondering if that just does that anyway, even if there's no load at all.
Where, where, I'm probing across.
From there to there.
Okay, so that's my 12 volts on the gates on the drive side one.
And then on...
So there's nothing coming out of the initial, the first stage of my drive circuitry, which is great.
That probably means that this power supply is just always going to give her.
I'm kind of okay with that.
I might want to open up and give it a little more room to breathe, but that's a later problem.
So now what I want to do is turn it on again.
Okay, so it's measuring 0.2 volts and change still.
That was not good. I felt some tingles.
Something is isolated well enough here.
Okay, so what's my resistance to chassis?
That's a good first check.
2 mega ohms.
Negative, that's not a good start.
1.9 mega ohms.
This capacitor is probably still discharging.
I was right.
The capacitor is going to slightly recharge anyway.
Excuse me? What now?
That's not good.
23 kilo ohms is a little bit low.
Why is there only 14k to ground?
What?
Something's wrong.
Something is like legitimately wrong.
I'm just going to unplug this.
Oh, you're actually kidding me, right?
You're actually kidding me.
Okay, then.
So this thing is a disaster waiting to happen.
Just as a sanity check first. Holy shit.
Oh my god.
Okay then.
So this variac is going to kill someone.
I'm going to have to break this thing apart and figure out why it's doing what it's doing.
It is, it appears to be a dead short.
Oh god, sorry for the shake. The short between the ground pin and the AC pins.
Which is really bad.
Wow.
Okay.
I'm fairly sure that my chassis ground, which is the case, is going to be connected to earth here.
Oh no, I guess not.
Nope.
Holy moly.
I didn't actually do a screw to the coarser to the power supply.
Wow.
Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
Okay, my sanity check is this.
I have a DC power supply that is not connected to any grounds on this thing anywhere.
It's plugged into the same thing as this one, the brain, the other power supply.
It doesn't matter. It skips the rectifier entirely, so the entire AC part of the system effectively doesn't exist.
What I get to check now is without weird ground loop shenanigans if the current is still flowing.
So using this supply, I can current limit it.
I should expect to see a very large increase in the current right away as the capacitors are all charged up.
And then once that's done, it should level off.
So let's turn it on.
Okay, 250 milliamps form.
So I have one amp, something is not correct here.
Something is not behaving. That one amp should drop down very fast.
See if anything is getting noticeably warm.
It does not appear that way.
Okay, next guess. I'm going to unplug this, disconnect a couple of the capacitors.
As long as I only touch one side, I don't have to worry about anything in particular.
I'm also going to just avoid touching the chassis.
Okay, this probably means it's not the very AC that's causing me the problem.
Hooray! More troubleshooting is fun.
I'm going to time-lapse this because it's not going to be the most thrilling thing on the planet.
I apologize for the wobbliness. I believe I have figured out the problem.
So I have this white and black wire.
Black is hot, white is neutral, or yeah, in this case positive and zero because it's DC, but whatever.
I think I got them backwards.
So I was essentially just dumping whatever my voltage was across the two diodes in each of these because I had them in parallel.
So I have flipped the things.
I've disconnected the capacitors just because I don't want to deal with them.
I still have this small tap so there still will be a little bit of inrush current.
But oh for my sanity, I had it wired right earlier and I think I had it wired right.
And oh for my sanity, I believe I had it wired right earlier.
Well, I know I had it wired right earlier because it was working at one point before I put it in this freaking box.
So I somehow pulled a big, a big dumb, dumb brain move and inverted it for some Godforsaken reason.
The way I'm going to check. Again, using the DC power supply just to remove variables.
Again, this should be a brief peak of current going in so it should go up for a bit as I'm increasing the voltage.
And then it should decrease down a ton.
Just turn that current limit to zero and let's go.
Hey, I had the wires backwards.
Damn it. On the bright side, very easy problem to fix.
On the not as bright side, I feel like a big dumb dumb.
So I'm going to attach a whole bunch of stuff together, get everything reassembled, and I'll see you back in a bit.
After that glorious massive troubleshooting, I will take one thing back that I said earlier.
The variac ground connected to neutral probably didn't cause my problem.
That being said, still not a good idea.
I know this in theory has no, it has no isolation.
What am I talking about? It has no isolation. The ground of this should not be connected to neutral.
Just kind of period. That's not a good idea.
Period.
Because lots of reasons. I will be addressing that and this will not be involved in the circuit in the long run.
And now I will have just be more aware that this chassis might get energized if...
Well, yeah, it could. It could get energized, which is just not so good.
Anyway, back at running this beast.
That was an interesting sound. That was hopefully something falling off the table.
Okay, doke skiddle-y-okly.
So this should now just work without all of this extra mucking about and being terrified of the fact that apparently there's a huge amount of current falling.
Duh, brain please.
I'm also like embarrassed and kind of laughing at myself that I got the polarity on the IGPT's wrong, but what can you do?
Alright, I'm again probing the DC side because I have this probe on the AC side.
I hooked up the capacitors again. I also hooked up the coupling toroid that would go to the work coil, but it's over here because I just...
One thing at a time. Turn the variac all the way down.
Switch it on. Cool.
That's looking good. And this is charging very slowly, which is nice.
Okay, so let's start powering up a bit.
Okay, that's good.
Switching ranges. There's a fly.
If it lands in the wrong spot, it's going to get poofed.
Okay, 23.
Just in case.
Okay, this is on now.
And we are drawing.
0.02 amps according to this.
So zero ampere, zero current essentially.
Obviously there's some because there's losses.
Still essentially zero current draw.
I'm not touching the chassis just because I don't want to mess with that.
68, 70, 80 volts.
Still drawing about zero.
So this is 59 volts. Yeah, that roughly checks out.
So when I turn this dial up, the current does go up a decent amount as it charges up the capacitors,
but because there's essentially nothing that's draining them,
the current drops down really, really fast.
If I removed the drain resistor, this current would probably be so low that it wouldn't be able to measure anything.
But I just want to get up to 120.
AC, not 120 DC.
90 volts, AC.
100 volts, AC.
So far, so good.
110.
And we're at outlet-ish, ish.
So you can see outlets giving me about 170 rectified.
That's just because of the peak-to-peak and shenanigans for transferring between them.
Just as one more sanity check here.
Again, I don't want to just touch the chassis.
Okay, the same voltage is also across the capacitors.
Yay, things are working. Okay, so let's power this down and turn it off.
The voltage is not going to drop very quickly, as I have mentioned several times before.
160 volts!
And this is going to take minutes to discharge.
But that's awesome. It worked.
Which means this whole setup is good, so I'm going to get the power meter mounted at the front so I can read it while I'm using it.
Time to once again release the ducts.
Don't mind the jank. There's a bolt stud in the way on the other side, so I have to go from the bottom.
Quick media change. Sorry about that.
So, variac is on.
Power meter.
Oh god, it's so difficult to read.
Currently drawing .2 amps.
2 volts AC, just because.
So, let's see if I can make it so you can see this little monstrosity.
Okay, so if I turn this on, it drops the current.
It drops the voltage so low that it no longer works.
That's awesome.
That's just absolutely fantastic.
Let's go a little higher then.
On the right side, I didn't hear any vibration in this.
So that's good.
Okay, 44 volts now.
Let's try that again.
So...
That's drawing a fat 60 amps at no load.
However, there's something very interesting here.
Watch the power factor.
It's skyrocketing, and the actual wattage is reading at zero.
So what that means is essentially all of the power that's getting brought in
is getting dumped back in, and it's almost entirely reactive power,
although I don't trust that wattage measurement in the slightest.
So, you know, whatever.
Okay, now let's do some heating testing.
So I have a nice par.
It shouldn't get hot, but I'd rather be careful.
So it was drawing 6 amps at about 36 volts DC, which is a lot.
Okay, so it's on.
As I'm loading it, the current is dropping.
Okay, you can't see a damn thing there.
So the power factor centers a little as I load it,
and the current drops like a stone to like 2 amps.
You can actually, hopefully, but probably can't see how much it changes
as I move this further in and out.
So it loads the work coil more or less.
That's pretty warm.
That's probably okay.
No, okay. Let's try.
Up to like 60.
I'm going to preload the work coil so I don't send the current into the actual stratosphere.
So that's still drawing 5 amps.
I hear a little bit of vibration out of the transformer now.
The paper is starting to smoke on this.
I'm actually just going to turn that off. I'm not sure what's burning off there, but clearly getting very hot and very fast.
Okay.
Switching to a slightly different bar steel just because
this shouldn't have any like random goodies on it.
Hopefully, we'll see.
Okay, let's do that again.
All right, so it's drawing about 3. something amps.
And it will go up to...
It actually goes down again. So it's still only at about 5 amps. That's pretty good.
Okay. I'm going to turn up the power a bit.
It's warm. It's warm.
It's really 85.
Yeah.
83.
You probably can't see the power meter at all, which I don't really like because that's kind of the whole fun.
That's the whole fun part.
So I'm going to do a little shimmy shimmy.
I'm trying to bring you down to the height where you can see it.
Oh my god, he's going to die again.
So you're tuning.
Oh, man, that backlight is awful. Holy moly.
Okay, so let's loosen this.
Correct.
Okay. And then I'm going to turn up the power meter.
And then I'm going to turn up the power meter.
Okay. And then I want to plug this in.
That would be kind of funny if it died right as the fun stuff happened.
As the fun stuff is going to happen soon.
Hopefully.
Okay.
So this needs to get plugged in.
All right.
So let us hit it with 83 volts to see that is quite one.
So the bar is already toasty.
I'm going to again preload the coil.
I need more room.
I don't want to be fighting anything here. Okay, so preload the coil.
Turn it on. How much current am I getting? Four amps.
Okay.
Up to five. Up to eight.
Okay, that's getting high.
It is starting to smell warm.
Decrease the load a little.
Yeah, something is a smoking.
I made a slight modification to one particular component.
Being the bar steel. I got rid of all of the mill scale on the part that's going to go into the coil.
Just so we have an easier time seeing what's going on.
And there's less likelihood of random stuff starting to smoke.
Okay. So I am looking at very low draw.
And let's hit it.
So four amps at 80 volts.
I mean, it's fairly stable. It's not as high as I would like.
Steel is definitely getting warm.
I'm also slightly confused why you aren't charging.
Oh.
Okay, sure. Alright, turn it up.
90 volts.
100 volts.
Again, I'm going to preload the coil.
Hopefully not trip a breaker.
Okay, preloading coil.
And turn off this backlight because it's hot poo poo poo poo.
On we go. I'm looking at five amps at 94 volts.
So this is dumping about 500 watts into the system.
What'll it go up to?
Six amps, seven amps, eight amps, nine amps.
If I reload the coil. Oh, okay, I can see the coil starting to discolor.
Okay, this is going to be a little bit of a load test.
So it peaks at eight amps at 100 volts.
That's a lot lower than I expected to be perfectly honest,
but hey, it's starting to get black. Alright, well, I'm going to turn this off and come back quickly.
Or am I? Oh, that coloration though.
Look at that. It's doing the thing.
Probably getting very close to getting red hot.
Current draws actually going down. Oh, it's getting really close to glowing.
Coloring though. Oh, it's so pretty.
Come on, you can do it. Just give me a little bit more.
Okay, I'm going to call it there. Whoa, it's hot.
This, this, this hot.
This hot, hot, hot, hot, hot. Eight amps at 100 volts.
I shouldn't blow the breaker at 120.
Okay, don't mind the million dollar server sound in the background.
On it goes. 11 amps unloaded because whoops, but seven amps loaded up.
So this is dumping about 7800 watts into this bar.
The voltage drop because of the voltage drop across the variac,
which I just realized I should probably look at and make sure isn't melting.
Okay, it's discoloring already. 1000 watts.
It's dropping back down.
700 watts. Getting that nice blue, almost white coloration on the steel.
Eight amps. So I don't expect this to melt it, melt the bar.
It might get it red hot. I honestly don't know.
If I was using a smaller bar of steel, it would probably stand a better chance.
Yeah, buddy. Don't know if you can see that nice, nice red glow.
Oh yeah, you can. Yeah, buddy.
That is some red hot steel from an induction heater on a wall outlet level of power.
Woo! Sorry for rip headphone users all that.
It's red hot. It did the thing.
Holy crap. I mean, it took a hot minute, but like, oh my God, it did the thing.
Woohoo! That's like legitimately very exciting.
I can feel the heat from here.
Like it's uncomfortably warm from here.
Yeah, buddy. So I was just poking around things in here just to give a little checky check.
This thing has no battery because of course it doesn't.
Well, that's fun. Whatever. This worked all right.
It's freaking hot. And a little bit warm.
Holy moly. What a mess.
I have made. Hit it harder.
Yeah. Yeah, it worked. Holy crap.
Also, I realized I think this is designed for thinner metal, but too late now.
So back at you with some other cool stuff that I learned during this project.
This is the other piece of the top of the case for the induction heater,
and this is steel that has been powder coated.
Powder coat is something that I'm not completely familiar with,
but essentially you take a really high voltage sprayer,
you hang whatever you're trying to coat on something that's negative,
and then you go and it sticks to it and cures and is a very tough, very robust coating.
Another fun thing about powder coat is you can etch it away with a laser.
So this is a Lichtenberg pattern that is not made using hilariously dangerous methods
and wood burning and stuff. Don't do that, please.
But I'm quite happy with how it turned out,
so I'm going to slap a really big one on the outside of the top of the case,
because I can, and why not? It'll be fun.
And with that, I pretty much have the induction heater part of this project more or less done.
We're going to give this a little bit of a touch up with some Scotch Brite or something like that
and give it a light coating of whey oil as well just to prevent any further oxidation.
But I'm quite happy with how it turned out.
Probably could have used a little bit more contrast, but looks pretty sick.
Heck yeah, but...
In my last endeavor of testing this system out,
I learned that this going through there and not being able to open this up is a gigantic pain.
So I'm planning on chopping off some metal on both sides of this
and also I'll recut this front piece to have it extend all the way up on both sides
and then have a top piece that bolts on that will fit there permanently.
I'll probably do a couple of heat set inserts into the back acrylic piece
so it's held in place when the system's running so it can't accidentally fall open.
But that'll just eliminate my inability to open this up
and access all the copper tubing and all the connections
without having to take it off first before opening it, which is just awful in every way.
So we'll have a mighty fun time with that today.
More of the duct machine as well, which is one of my new favorite tools.
I did some things, including but not limited to the chop,
which you may or may not have seen in a time lapse because it probably wasn't very interesting.
I also did a little bit more design because I needed to replace this piece of acrylic
with another more different piece of acrylic and another more different piece of acrylic.
I then cut out said other piece of acrylic and other more different piece of acrylic.
I then put some heat press inserts into it.
That was an adventure.
Yeah, just it was an adventure, but it's done.
So that's good. This one, I don't have to do anything to.
I'll just put some bolts through these to hold this on
and make this relatively rigid when it's mounted.
And I went to put it on. Okay, sweet, sweet.
Actually, I just realized another problem live, but that's that's for later.
First problem, I had this nice to line up.
However, it does not fit because these two bolts are interfering.
The other thing I just found out live is these heat press inserts.
I didn't get them all the way in. I'm going to have to do that because with the side that they are on,
they are sitting against the steel.
So they have to be flush or past flush.
So two things to fix.
Well, to the whoops bud.
So two things to fix now.
Gonna have to cut out a little bit of extra steel here and here.
I'll do that with the duck saw that I'm now calling it because it's awesome.
And the other thing I'm going to have to do is press these inserts in.
And the other thing I'm going to have to do is press these inserts in further
until at least flush or past flush and remove any material that's proud of this flat plane.
So that'll fit tight against there and I can tighten this down onto it.
So this will be fun.
Yes, I'm just going to do it.
Actually, I should measure the surface because rain.
Sometimes I have one.
But only sometimes do I have a brain.
For example, right now I don't really have a brain.
Okay, that's good.
That's a mark and that's a mark.
RIP headphone users for this entire bill.
Now time for the other adventure, which I will actually show you this time because
yeah, why not? It's fine.
Come join me for the fun. I have the saugering iron cranked up to a bajillion degrees.
And then I just shove it into the acrylic.
That's it. And then sit and wait for literally like eons.
I feel like it doesn't really like melting.
Also, I'm very intentionally avoiding the fumes because I can almost guarantee they're not good.
I will save you the pain and only fill the first one because it takes a minute.
My assumptions as to why it's taking a hot fricking minute is a fewfold.
One, this is a chongest thick piece of acrylic.
Two, the tip I'm using is definitely not sized properly for this particular endeavor.
I'm mostly just interfacing with the cover, which is not quite as good at conducting heat
from the actual heating element.
And third, this is just not smart.
The acrylic seems to be pretty good at wicking heat.
So it's bouncing back, so that's fun. So I have to actually go well below flash.
That's actually pretty close to okay.
That's probably fine. Now I will not make you watch the rest of this.
It's mounted properly now. I have some nice, the heatset inserts mounted.
I have this mounted to here. I want to get something a little more sturdy on this side.
It's currently, it's a little floppy without this part on, but when this is on,
A plus is good enough for me.
That's probably going to be almost all I do for this build,
until the actual upgrade with Linus.
I'm going to take a whole bunch of stuff out, and then reassemble it with Linus,
which you will have probably already seen,
because Floatplane shenanigans.
But thanks for coming along on this hilarious ride with me.
I suspect there will probably be a little bit of post shots of the system fully going,
and heating steel up properly,
and then hitting some stuff with a hammer and deforming it.
A plus would do again. This was a very fun project.
Thanks Intel, and thanks Floatplane for watching and having a jolly good time.
Welcome to the gong show that is me having money and time to do things.
It's great.