165e pcb

[MonsterLandrover]

Afternoon all,

Got my bargain 165e working great untill it wouldnt stop! It didnt matter if the trigger was pulled or not! Thinking it was a short in the torch, I removed it and turned it on again. Sure enough, the wire spooled out! after some more poking around I have deduced that there is a fault on the pcb.

I have called clarke service (very helpful actually! went out their way to help) and there is no longer a board avaliable for it. Soooo..... it looks like im going to have to repair the board.

If anyone has any manuals or schematics for it (its the mk1 not the mk2 :-s) I would be greatful!

 

[keith19]

It's not on here, is it? The TE shown is probably a later model:
http://www.clarkeservice.co.uk/product_manuals/mig_welders.shtml

You could also try Clarke direct here:
http://www.clarkeservice.co.uk/contact_hours.shtml

 

[keith19]

This thread might be useful?
http://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=11261

 

[MonsterLandrover]

Right, after ages spent on the phone again, no results. So i set to at fault finding the pcb. I have found several components that wern't functioning as they should. More time spent looking at data sheets and finding alternative components to the very out dated ones on the board. The cost of replacing all of them was now getting very high and to be honest its a very poor design anyway.

So... although analogue electronics have their use, we are in a digital age. I have decided to design a digital control using a micro controller.

just a couple of questions about new features I have the possibility to add:

1. Is there an advantage to having pre and post flow on mig?
2. Is there any need for a stitch weld function (I have never heard of anyone using it!)
3. On a small machine, would it be usefull to have the function where you press the trigger once and it keeps welding and you press the trigger again to stop it (forgotten what its called)?

Also considering putting the wire speed adjustment on the gun.

 

[mike 109444]

Hi MonsterLandrover. You might want to take a look at the web site "diy-welder.com. It's a good read and the guy on there had designed various boards and does give discriptios of some of it's workings. I would have thought the wire feed adj on gun would be good but might be better having a fine control and the "normal" one on m/c being the course. It would need to be done in such a way that you are not knocking it round all the time, but able to be operated with gloves! I think you will find that some of the higher end m/c's tie a change in power to the wire feed such that an increase in power will automaticly increase the wire feed speed. don't think I would go for a latching weld (Item 3) as working on car body stuff you are going to be doing more of tac tac tac ect. Also if trigger Knocked (by foot?) it would feed untill you could get to tourch to operate trigger again!! If you could make the board universal then you might be able to shift some on here for thoes with duff boards. Let us know how this get on.

 

[MonsterLandrover]

Cheers Mike!

It was actually DIY Welders site that gave me the idea! He uses a PIC micro, but i am planning on using the Atmel ATMEGA 1280 as you can have PWM outputs. This means I can use buttons to change the wire speed up and down.

The plan for that was have two large(ish) buttons on the gun and a hold button on the machine so when you get the perfect wire speed, press hold so it dosn't matter if you push the gun buttons whilst working!

That's a good point about the latching trigger. It could be added as its only in the software if anybody wanted it. on that note, I am looking into doing small batches of these as they should be universal. If a machine has a different configuration, it could be modded easily!

And finally to update, I nearly have a working code and prototype, just having a problem with a bouncing trigger (sometimes the micro controller carn't decide if the trigger is on or off!) so changing some code and hardware setup to fix it!

If anyone else has any suggestions, They are always welcome!

 

[mike 109444]

You've been busy! One thing I would say is to make the electronics VERY robust and possible wrong connect proof because if you are shipping the finished board out to others to fit there will be thoes that will connect it up wrong (as if : )) Don't forget there will be lots of spikes on the voltage rails and even rf around a mig when it's welding. Let me know when you start to build a inverter mig : )