I found that 100 uH was a good all around value for these solar garden light circuits. But at the time I made these around 2009 the 5252 4 legged chip was uncommon and almost all the garden lights used 2 discrete transistors. I don’t know why they started using the 4 legged 5252 – it would have made more sense to use a 4 pin surface mount chip.<\/p>\n
I bought a few dozen 100 uH 10% chokes from an online guy and I measured them at 75 to 80 uH with two different meters. I emailed the guy and I sent them back and he refunded the $$. He also measured them at too low a value with more than one meter, so he had no explanation for the out of tolerance issue. This isn’t the first time I’ve had this problem.<\/p>\n
So I gave up on RF chokes for this circuit and started buying the Fair-Rite 594300(something) 3\/8 inch or 9mm ferrite toroid cores for 12 cents apiece and winding a 8 inch or so piece of wire on them to make any value of choke that I need. They’re lower resistance so have less I squared R losses than an RF choke – every loss takes away from the brightness of the LEDs. I’m much more satisfied by the results. Every electronics tech or hobbyist should have a few dozen ferrite toroid cores in his parts stock to quickly wind a needed value of inductance. The cores can be from .25 inch or 6mm up to more than 1 inch or 25 mm but larger sizes get expensive. You can get them already wound, of course. A good source for small ones were the CFL lights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found that 100 uH was a good all around value for these solar garden light circuits. But at the time I made these around 2009 the 5252 4 legged chip was uncommon and almost all the garden lights used 2 discrete transistors. I don’t know why they started using the 4 legged 5252 – <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[327,326,78,4,12,77,13,206],"tags":[360],"class_list":["post-13279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assemblies","category-ics","category-inductors","category-joule-thief-smps-dc-dc","category-led","category-leds","category-lighting","category-toroids-and-cores","tag-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13279"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13281,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13279\/revisions\/13281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}