Great points, thanks for that. I think I’m getting a clearer idea what’s going on inside the Atmel, I’ll go read through that STAR thread again.
Up to now I’ve mostly just left the nitty gritty MCU and firmware stuff to people who know what they’re doing but it seems that’s bitten me a bit here.
When you push things a bit too far and have to troubleshoot something like this it’s really important understanding how all the “lego” parts function and where the limits are.
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Having said that…excessive stacking got us into this problem, so surely more stacking can get us out?! Right?
You think of using a P channel mosfet to solve the problem elegantly I start thinking in terms of stacking. :8)
Can I stack 3 Attiny13As on top of each other, flash them together and keep the pwm pins separated to feed each driver puck?…simples? Unfortunately that’s the first solution that came to mind in order to deal with this kind of problem, haha
No idea if the flashing process can address multiple chips in this way, most likely not. But I don’t see why just having a trio of these chips flashed separately and running the same firmware wouldn’t at least solve the issue in a ham fisted way. Maybe I can airwire a few onto the MCU board if there’s no other option…that or actually learn to do this properly…lol
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Yes the Welding glass certainly has some uses, apart from the novelty factor of being able to stare directly into a 10k lumen source of course. (can’t hold it there too long though, it get’s hot incredibly quickly!)
I just found that detecting a relatively minor fluctuation in the output wasn’t one of them. You COULD see the flicker if you looked carefully but seeing the result in the output was much more apparent. It’s not on the same scale of a visibly flickering emitter you get on some moonlight modes for example.
Certainly if an emitter has a bad segment it would be immediately obvious, it’s very handy to have a piece of dark glass lying around for that alone. Before moonmode drivers where common it was also a useful way to study how emitters and reflectors interact.