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Electronic Designs |
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Important - Please Read This First
These are electronic circuits that we have designed and use regularly in our lab. The ".pcb" and ".sch" files contained in the ".zip" files are Express PCB circuit board and schematic files. You can view them using free software available at http://www.expresspcb.com/. You can use this software to order the boards online. Unfortunately the software uses a proprietary format, so you can't use these files to order circuit boards from anywhere else. Luckily, we have had a pretty good experience with them, and their prices seem competitive.
The boards have notes printed in the copper, so you don't need to pay to have the silk-screen layer or solder mask layer. The revision date of the files is included in each filename in the format YY_MM_DD where YY is the two-digit year, MM is the month, and DD is the day.
Many of our designs make use of surface mount components. These are necessary to achieve the lowest possible noise and highest bandwidths. We have found that they aren't too difficult to work with, but they require different techniques than working with through-hole components. You can get more information about working with surface mount components in a lab setting by clicking here. We have found that the DAC chips used in some of our designs are easily destroyed if they don't get the correct voltages. As such we suggest building the circuit first without the DAC, and only adding it after it has been verified that the DAC will get the right voltage.
If you find any errors in these designs or the board layouts, or if you make improvements to our designs, please let us know. If you use our design, I'd appreciate it if you sent me a note so that I know that our efforts to post them are valuable and worth our time.
I suggest that you completely understand the schematic before purchasing boards. If you need help implementing our designs, feel free to contact us, but please do your part first - we don't have time to do "tech support." These designs are offered to the public as a service, without any implied warranty.
If you wish to be contacted when we update designs, add new designs, or add information to this page, please contact us and we'll try to remember to email you when this happens.
Laser Current Driver
We have developed a diode laser current driver with extremely low noise, high stability, and a high modulation bandwidth. This circuit is described in detail in a publication that you can download here. The files below are essentially the same as the driver described in the paper, but with a few upgrades. The board has been laid out in a way that will allow the same circuit board to be used to realize a positive or negative supply. The same board can be used to produce relatively low currents (near or below 200 mA) with extreme precision, or high currents (greater than 3 A) just by changing a few components. Please pay attention to notes on the schematic as well as notes printed on the circuit board itself.
Schematic and PCB file: LDcurrentDriver_09_01_29.zip
We eventually plan to add more information, including the layout of holes to mount the board in an enclosure and a parts manifest. Stay tuned . . .