Hi, My name is Mike, I'm a mechanical engineering student
I'm building a digitally controlled electromagnet for a project, the system needs to be controlled between 0V to 24 Volts DC with up to
4 Amps of current and I do not think that PWM will be a suitable control on this devce for a variety of reasons (it gets complicated, but trust me though, no PWM).I found a design on a website for an adjustable power supply, and given that for the purposes of experimentation we will be using a lab-bench DC power supply set to provide 30V DC power, and then regulate that current. It means that we can eliminate the transformer and bridge rectifier for now. The design I am proposing involves using a digital potentiometer to replace the manually controlled potentiometer shown in the design below
My problem right now is that the digital potentiometers that I have seen seem to be limited to only 5VDC. At the voltage which I intend to use, I am very sure that I will be blowing it up when I reach certain voltage levels. Is there a way of buffering the digital Pot such that I can avoid barbecuing it, while still being able to use it to provide digital power control. I was provided with an x9c103 digital potentiometer from Xicor/Intersil (10K Ohm, with 100 wiper positions)
Is there a simple way to buffer this digital Potentiometer (use OP-Amps, a transistor, magic faerie dust) so that even though it only has a 5 Volt survival range, I can use it to control the larger voltage?
Thanks in advance