Gary Lech <[email protected]> writes:

To add to what Keith said on the subject already...

Even if you put a dead short on the igniter terminals of one of our
boards (not recommended, but it happens), there's always some series
resistance in the wiring itself, circuit boards, screw terminals, the
FET channel "on" resistance, etc.  And our pyro circuit, which is
designed to throttle the energy delivered to active devices just enough
to keep the processor from crashing has the interesting side-effect of
acting faster when there's a dead short on the igniter terminals,
limiting the total energy delivered and thus helping to protect the FET
which never really has time to warm up.

> Should I be adding a current limiting resistor to protect the FET?

No.  I can't remember ever seeing a board come back with a FET blown in
normal use.  It's just not an issue.

By the way, bench testing I did myself with a good HP scope and some
commercial e-matches a few years ago showed that they usually fired
within about 13 microseconds.  That's why we think 50 milliseconds is
more than enough on-time... but we made it configurable for those who
have weird igniters, or are using our boards to switch power to some
other downstream device.

Bdale

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