Discharging a cap through a saturating inductor

But a skilled designer would be able to deal with that.

But that doesn't excuse a clumsy scheme to get it, and limiting yourself to only burning tens of watts all the time does leave you stuck with long discharge times.

Then you need to educated them.

And the safety discharge circuit turned off.

Cool. Show us.

Kicking in the depletion fet gives an almost linear discharge, to get to millivolts in the required time.

Educated?

Tell a gigabuck government project that they are idiots? That's something you would do.

That doesn't seem safe to me.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Do your detail design for you? For a project you haven't told us much about? The design process starts by finding out exactly what is going on

- and area where you don't do well - and working out how to change that in a way that makes the customer happy.

This is one more of your ostensibly snappy responses that reveal that you don't know what you are talking about.

A remarkably long time.

That's not how you do it, and it certainly hasn't been the way I've done it, not that any of my customers have been idiots. Somebody who hires you to do design work may not be all that clever, so you may have a less persuasible audience.

Development work is less safe than routine operation.

OK, your professional design services are so valuable and so much in demand that I can't afford them. My loss.

I posted my circuit. The dischage is nearly linear and flattens out to millivolts in the specified two minutes. That time can easily scale as required.

I was kinda hoping that some people here might have better suggestions.

We manufacture electronics to sell. That involves test techs, production people, and QC. Folks that we like.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

But people who are competent at electronics? You don't seem to be all that good at it, but your business survives, perhaps because you spend a lot of your time being silly here.

The point here is that you accepted an order to discharge a capacitor after the AC supply failed. When you realised that you didn't have access to an indication that the AC supply had failed, you didn't go back to the customer to get the order revised to something that could be delivered, but rather improvised your own specification that you could meet without asking any embarrassing questions - the ones that you sold have asked when you first got the order.

That wouldn't be much fun. My discharge circuit is fun.

You do seem to chose very strange ways of serving your customers.

Certainly. They don't want ordinary cheap stuff.

Electronic design, actual circuit design, seems to be a rare skill these days, especially among college kids. Cool.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Obviously not. Selling extraordinarily expensive cheap stuff is a way of standing out from the crowd.

And you imagine you have it to offer? Wonders will never cease. You can't even recognise a two transistor emitter-coupled monostable when it is presented as an LTSpice schematic.

I recognized it. The tube version is in the MIT RadLab books, from

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It was a faster version of the circuit I published in 1979.

Ghiggino, K.P., Phillips, D., and Sloman, A.W. "Nanosecond pulse stretcher",Journal of Physics E: Scientific Instruments, 12, 686-687 (1979).

Ken Ghiggino wanted the publication, and wrote the first version of the paper which I cleaned up for him - I'd got the circuit design from Ian Kimber and adapted it for Ken's application, so I did know more about it than he did, and while I didn't think that it was worth publishing, Ken and Dave had found it useful, so I went along with them.

It's trigger pulse came out of a mode-locked laser (which what you seemed to be getting your pulse from) and I didn't tweak anything.

I did have to slow down the trigger pulse by a factor of a thousand or so to make the circuit act like the pulse amplifier you thought you were looking at. That wasn't a tweak - just an explanatory gesture.

The 1979 circuit did need a 10nsec output pulse because it was driving