I was running a number of tests with the design I had a couple of days ago and there were two things that irked me. After every test, I had to drain the capacitor with the CapacitorDrainSwitch switch and had to turn the main PowerSwitch switch off and back on. I also think the PowerSwitch on and off switch might be damaging to the IC chips. Thus, I redesigned the circuit by adding an XOR gate and moving the CapacitorDrainSwitch switch--it is now called CircuitResetSwitch and has two functions. The XOR gate keeps the power to the circuit on as long as the CircuitResetSwitch switch is not closed. When the CircuitResetSwitch switch is closed, the XOR gate will turn off voltage (in a digital sense, i.e. pull voltage low) to the circuit and will activate the TransistorSwitch to drain the capacitor at the same time. So now, after each test, I simply need to press the CircuitResetSwitch and I am ready for the next test.
I went back to my laser trigger circuit. The sound detector is too hard to use--I think it will work well for balloons popping, a gun fire, or a firecracker, though.
ReplyDeleteWith the laser circuit, something was not quite right. I needed to add a diode (in this case, I use an LED) right before the potentiometer to prevent any current (from TransistorSwitch) from flowing back to ORgate1. Without the diode, the CircuitResetSwitch would not work properly.