Disgraceful!

No. The uglier it is, the better it works.

Thanks! Functionally I cannot fault it. It's just butt ugly and I don't really believe that makes it work better. However, I have been known to be wrong sometimes when it comes to electronics, so I'll bow to your superior knowledge.

I disagree. Pretty protos and pcb's and schematics work better, for some very good reasons.

Works for me.

Sorry - what exactly works for you? Are you saying you can visualize

Your Dremmeling has improved no end. That board referenced by your middle link above: what frequency is it intended for?

Ugly often makes it harder to troubleshoot. And if it always works the first time, you're not trying hard enough. :-) Ed

Carbide dental burrs, Mantis, lots of practice.

That was hundred-amp microsecond stuff. I did that mostly to test some parts to destruction.

Visualizing the schematic and the layout and making both as beautiful as possible. Beautiful things work better.

Certainly. PCB layout is fun, like a 3D color chess game. But it's so labor intensive that I delegate most layouts. I do a few critical ones, like picosecond stuff, because it's harder to explain to someone else than it is to just do it.

The T840 makes 1200 volt pulses. There's no AC involved. It's powered by 24 VDC.

There's a 'pen' type extension tool you can get which improves control no end. Uses a flexible cable with a steel wire inside to convey the drive from the dremmel. So it's like holding a Sharpie rather than a bulky lump with a motor in it.

Using those slender wires and SMB connectors? I know you can get away with thin stuff for short durations of high current over short distances, but how did you know your arrangement was good for that much current?

I might as well give up and start collecting stamps instead, then.

OK, I got the impression from a previous question you posted that YOU were unable to visualise and wanted to know if anyone on the group who COULD was also good at laying out boards. I can and I'm not!

And this is all for testing to destruction? Why not just accept the 'maximum' figures on the datasheet?

The wires are gate drive and current monitor.

The circuit should be obvious. Two black things are TVS diodes.

I see mechanical things in my head, and schematics with waveforms and current flowing around. But some people, including programmers, don't visualize objects. People are very different.

I don't write a lot of software, but if I do I draw a diagram to plan it. State machines with lots of GOTO's.

The T840 is a real product for a real application. Nothing needed to be tested for that one. It is a pretty board.

We assign Z series drawing numbers to experiments, which are sometimes dremeled and sometimes a proto PCB. Either way, we document the hardware and the results.

Data sheet maximums need not always be believed. You get performance by pushing parts.

Mosfet avalanche ratings are especially fuzzy. As are RF part voltages.

Why obvious? Were we expected to look up the datasheets from the numbers on the chips in the photo and 'reverse engineer' a schematic? Forgive me if I'm missing something here - it has been known! :-)

You state that like it's a virtue!

Knowing the state of a machine is a virtue. When you have fun using a fancy OS, millions of lines of code that you didn't write, and a maze of fifo's and sockets and mutexes and multitasked stuff, you don't know the system state.

Dijkstra, the classic enemy of goto, "did not have regular access to a computer."

It should be mostly obvious. Everything is in plain sight.