Just a quick update.
The boards are all gone, thanks to all who were interested in them.
As for the supply/controller board and firmware, i hope to get back to it in a week or two. I'm rather busy with a customers project at the moment and thus don't really have the time to do much on this one. However, i added some functions to the firmware, as well as the core of a state-machine to handle power-up, sleep, power-down, etc. with various options. It will be fully user configurable as well.
What it can do is to start at different power up modes, normal, limited and boost. "Limited" means to limit power uptake during initial heatup, "boost" means increased power during that. After a given time the unit can go into sleep, at which point it will go into "limited" mode, reducing power consumption. It will auto-detect any thermal load changes, and upon reaching a threshold will wake-up again, optionally in "boost" mode to decrease recovery time from sleep. Also, after staying a given amount of time in sleep, it will shut-down the RF stage completely.
Wakeup is then done by pushing/handling the encoder. Of course the state-machine also restarts when the tip is changed. What's left to do is to implement some software-based protection features, for example against too high SWR, supply, etc. And finally, of course, packaging it all together with a decent UI. Al settings will be stored in the internal EEPROM of the µC. Speaking of which, for development i currently use the PIC 18F2620. It can probably be scaled down later, once i know what the final memory usage will be. Also, i added a RS232 interface to the board, so that the µC can later be updated through the bootloader (i use TinyBLD here) without needing a PIC programmer. Of course the BL has still to be programmed using a regular programmer.
Greetings,
Chris