I restore vintage calculators, those of late 60s-early 70s can have several hundred early DTL and TTL ICs, many now unobtanium. Also generally have linear power supply regulators and at least one of my machines has dozens of failed ICs (some actually blown open) after a pass transistor failed short.
One way to protect from such events while maintaining originality is to put a volt clamp on vulnerable supplies. The intent is to cause a hard short on overvoltage with beefy enough load so as to blow the original fuses, or sometimes add a new fuse if the existing fusing looks under-done. For that matter blowing up the power supply is perhaps preferable to frying 200 ICs! My design based on something from AoE, with the goal of a pretty well-defined and hard turn on. This circuit (without R5, Q2, R8 and LED) has served me well enough, mindful that the load R, TIP122 and local environment will suffer until fuse blows or other help arrives.
My problem arose when I wanted to add an alarm for a particular situation. Adding Q2 and associated parts gave a visual indication when the clamp was on. But if I substitute (R8 + LED) with a piezo buzzer, I get odd results. (The buzzer sounds with 5-20VDC, drawing 20 odd mA, it tests open one way and high R the other, so I think its piezo with driver).
With the buzzer I get sound as the clamp turns on, and for a volt or so of overvolt, but as the input voltage rises even more the sound goes off, and will not return even if input taken to low level and then raised again. I'm puzzled because the clamp action keeps the voltage on circuit pretty constant, and I'm not seeing how the increasing current thru R7/Q3 affects buzzer operation. Is that buzzer adding another effect I'm unaware of?.
Hoping for some pointers to what I need to learn to get this working. Thanks in advance.