Hopefully I'm not totally off base in what follows. That would be embarrassing!
I've been looking at building my own SMPS to drive my nixies from 5V or thereabouts. I think it would be hard to beat John Taylor's teeny power supplies on this front, but sometimes I might want to squeeze it into a different form factor, plus the completist in me just plain wants to do it. It seems that using a flyback transformer would be a good way to go, but this is itself an example of exactly the sort of thing that has me all riled up! Now it is more than possible that I might be under some gross misunderstanding in what follows, but a transformer is a transformer. There is no such thing as a flyback transformer. You can use a transformer in a flyback design, but that doesn't make the transformer special. It is still just a transformer, and the same transformer could be used in a variety of other designs and applications. However, the world seems to have decide that there are a wide variety of different types of transformer. This is a small sample: PoE, SMPS, Pulse, CFL, Power, Energy harvesting, Coupled inductors (this last one deserves its own place in hell, isn't that just another term for transformer?) etc. Distributors and manufacturers split their offerings into these categories, making it especially difficult to actually find a transformer when you are trying to search on windings ratio! Oh. And it turns out that a lot of these actually have a 1:1 windings ratio. Sigh. But wait. it gets worse! Even assuming that you can actually find the windings ratio, the world has then decided that it is a good idea to talk about primary and secondary coils. Now it could be that there is some useful distinction between these two coils in a real world design, but as far as I know transformers are symmetrical devices. I can feed either coil, and use the other as the output, as long as I don't exceed the specs for each. It gets even worse! It seems like the world of transformers is especially fluid. Parts come and go like leaves in a storm (o.k., there might be a better metaphor, but I'm on a rant here!). At this point, I'm figuring that I'll just have to wind my own, which is possibly a step further than I had wanted to go! Anyway I've bought an LCR meter to help me out, and I'm poking around in the old parts from the boiler in my basement. 20kV anyone? I feel a digression coming on. BTW I'm trying to keep some very impatient parrots off my iPad while I write this, so apologies for formatting errors, spelling errors and general incomprehensibilties. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/b50c1248-afc7-44f7-9d74-3d6e57f5f85b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
