One thing about the type of power supply that relies on a capacitor in the manner that the clock design in the link from www.dos4ever.com is that the capacitor will degrade over time for every voltage spike on the mains, this is as designed by the capacitor manufacturers but it also means that the capacitance will become lower over time as the self-healing properties are not 100% so the voltage you get from this power supply will get lower over time. There was a big problem with this a few years ago as the capacitors that were manufactured over a time degraded faster than designed so many home appliances went dead long before they were intended to (I worked with smart electricity meters that were also affected by this problem and it took a long time to find out that it was these capacitors that were the problem). Finally they found out that there were manufacturing problems of these polypropylene capacitors that meant that they degraded faster than designed. The costs for repairing the electricity meters were in part covered by the capacitor manufacturers but I guess that it was a loss to everyone in the end. So you should count on the capacitor giving up at some point, but modern capacitors nowadays take some of this into account as the manufacturers realized that they had to change the manufacturing process to make better and more reliable capacitors (but since cost has always been the driving point for these types of components they might not be so much better anyway).
Do some googling on for instance "smart meter capacitive power supply problems" and you'll see some discussions and documents on this. Choose a specially designed capacitor for this use and your power supply will live a lot longer and don't just put any capacitor in there! /Martin -- 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 neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/8ada5faf-c4fc-4328-8ff2-abcbeceba981%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
