


Inductive Spikes: Simulation and Reality




Here's the schematic I came up with in LTSpice:


So, what does it look like when you simulate it?

Across the top, you can see the voltage that gets applied to the voltage controlled switch. Across the back, you see large negative spikes in voltage. Really large. We see spikes of nearly 7 megavolts. Pretty amazing, from a 3.6 volt supply! This simulation may be overly optimistic: after all, it doesn't take into account the stray resistance and capacitance that are likely to be present. But clearly Atdiy's real life test indicates that high voltages are being developed.

In real life applications where inductive loads might be connected and disconnected quickly to varying loads, it's common to use diodes to protect the remaining circuit from these high voltage spikes. We can do that in our simulated circuits too. Let's add a pair of diodes to shunt both positive and negative voltages to zero (I picked 1N4158 diodes, somewhat arbitrarily):

They do their job, check out the voltages:



Flashback: the DEC 1091 at the University of Oregon


Here's a link, so I don't forget it later.

Index of /pdp10/downloads.

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Magnetic core memory reborn… on an Arduino????

I may have mentioned before, I'm kind of old. One measure of how old I am is the fact that I've actually programmed machines that used core memory. Real core memory. Little ferrite donuts on arrays of wires.

Some time ago, I remember running across this awesome blog post from "Wayne's Tinkering Page" which showed some experimentation in creating a driver for some surplus 1mm ferrite memory cores, effectively creating a single bit memory. I thought that was pretty darned cool. But what's even more amazing is what Ben North and Oliver Nash have done: create a 32 bit core memory shield for an Arduino.



Magnetic core memory reborn

Very cool.