Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
24VAC inverter for Christmas lights.
aargee:
For a long time now I've put up a range of outdoor Christmas lights. It all started when the kids were little... <insert dream video sequence here>
anyway...
Most of my gear runs from 24VAC (or has been converted to). In the past I have removed the russian roulette of power boards and plugpacks down to one 240-24V 150VA Transformer running the lot - now mostly all commercial LED strings.
I have come across a quantity of Gates Cyclon SLA batteries and want to run the lot from solar. The DC side is under control and the lights don't like running from DC. So I have to produce 24VAC.
The inefficient way would be to use the batteries to run an off the shelf 240V inverter, and plug the current system into that. I'm thinking of running a H-Bridge to produce a square wave 24V at 50Hz, I'm sure the little Chinese light strings would be OK with a square wave, maybe with a bit of capacitance to reduce the sharp wave edges...
I'm just looking for a design to start from, anyone have any clues/pointers?
TIA
- Rob.
IanB:
It's curious the lights don't like 24 V DC. Have you tested some to make sure? The reason being that most power supplies that take an AC input rectify it to DC before they do anything else with it, unless they have a traditional transformer inside them which is uncommon these days.
Simon:
yes surely leds run off DC, if you really need an AC generator H-bridge circuits are quite easy, you can use a micro-controller quite simply
hacklordsniper:
--- Quote from: Simon on November 21, 2011, 07:01:16 am ---yes surely leds run off DC, if you really need an AC generator H-bridge circuits are quite easy, you can use a micro-controller quite simply
--- End quote ---
Even a 555 if a micro is not available
Simon:
err, I think the 555 has shoot through, that might cause some big shoot through on your H-bridge, but the power transistors will get a lot hotter
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version