Ni-Cad Battery Zapper, A Rechargeable Battery Reconditioner

Ni-Cad (NiCd, NiCad) battery, sometimes doesn’t work as expected, gives no power and cannot be recharged. In this situation, the battery need to be reconditioned. It’ is possible that the battery is internally shorted, and we can get the battery into life again by recondition the Ni-Cad battery using a zapper circuit. This circuit restore the Ni-Cad battery from shorting by forcing a high current flow to burn the internal dirt. The current stored in the high capacitance capacitor is heavy discharged by the SCR when zapping, and the SCR is used to disconnect the battery connection when charging the capacitor. A 120 ohm 10W resistor is used to limit the current when charging the capacitor, and you have to make sure the LED’s intensity has reach the steady state before switching to zap position. After zapping the battery and switch to charge position, the charging process will take some period and indicated by the LED which will gradually increase the brightness until get stable intensity when fully charged. The power supply for this circuit can be taken from small transformer (350 mA to 1 A) with half or full wave rectifier. Here is the schematic diagram of the battery zapper circuit:

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Main Power-Battery Backup Switcher

The schematic diagram shown below is a battery backup regulator circuit, useful for memory or other low power (battery operated) but critical circuit (must continue operation on powerline failure). The one LT020 will not conduct in under line-powered condition, made possible by means of of feedback string’s arrangement. In case of main power failure, the battery-driven LT1020 will turn on and maintain the load, when the line LT1020 go off because the line goes down.

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High-Voltage Generator with HEX FET

The schematic diagram below show a circuit of high voltage generator. This circuit uses a 4049 hex inverter as an oscillator, and you can use ignition transformer from automotive engine. A fly-back transformer is possibly usable too. The 4049 will drive the IRF731 HEX FET. The Q1 must be heatsinked. Here is the schematic diagram of the circuit:

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Voltage-Controlled Attenuator (Volume Control) Using FET

Using the circuit shown in the schematic diagram below, we can control the low-level audio signals with ±3V variable DC voltage. This attenuator circuit uses a field effect transistor (FET) to shunt the signal to ground. The R2 is used to control the output level (the attenuation level), but you can use other source of voltage signal to control the grid of the FET, such as DAC output, just remember that this voltage is a negative going signal (you can use with DAC which uses symmetric power supply system). The minimum output of this circuit is when gate bias is zero. When the gate bias is set close to pinchoff value, the circuit will produce maximum output with value that equal to input level. Here is the schematic diagram of the circuit:

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60-dB Range Compressor For Audio

A compressor circuit shown in the schematic diagram below can produce consistent output of 1.4V P-P over entire 60dB range that is very useful for audio level/volume stabilization.  As the main components, this circuit uses a 741 opamp and JFET. With input range of 20mV to 2oV, this circuit has delay time of 0.4s (decay time)  and response time of 1.2ms (attack time). The JFET is used as  voltage-controlled resistor in peak-detecting control loop of 741 opamp.

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Three Cells Produce Regulated 3V – 3.3V

Three NiCad and NiMH batteries can be used to produce 3V/3.3V supply voltage. This can be done by this linear regulator circuit. This circuit uses an ICL7611 micropower op amp and MAX872 voltage reference. This regulator can be used to replace the charge pump or a switching regulator. The dropout characteristics of this circuit depends on the characteristics of Q1. The Q1 must have a gate-threshold voltage below the lowest battery voltage when this circuit is used with low voltage like a three-cell battery. Here is the schematic diagram of the circuit:
This circuit requires input voltage from 3V to 15V. This circuit has two mode, high power mode and low power mode that can be selected by logic at the MODE SELECT input. With Vin 6.5V, the quiescent current is 70µA when operated in high power mode and decrease to 40µA when it is used in low power mode. This circuit has maximum load power of 5mA in low power mode and 1A in high power mode.

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TLC497CN Negative Supply Generator

Negative supply from positive supply is needed if the circuit need both positive and negative supply while we have only positive supply. The circuit shown in the schematic diagram below is a negative supply generator, built using a TLC497CN integrated circuit. The TLC497CN is used as the main switching  circuit, and it can provide negative supply of up to 150mA. With an input supply of 10V, this circuit has efficiency about 50% but it is decreased under 50% when the input voltage is 5V. This circuit use resistor R1 to protect the IC1 from damage by limiting the current at the input to IC1 because this circuit is often be fed from high current supply. To control the average output voltage, TLC497CN uses a variable clock frequency and a fixed pulse width. The timing component in the oscillator section of the PWM this circuit is capacitor C3. capacitors C2 and C1 are supply-decoupling components on the input supply.

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