Improving the improved?
July 9, 2020 2 Comments
A bit of a long hiatus for me but don’t worry, nothing’s happened or anything. Simply the combination of decent summer weather and the usual “pre-holiday” panic at work, trying to get everything finished before people start taking time off during July and August. Fortunately, even though I might not be focused on diyaudio doesn’t mean that everyone else isn’t either…
As I’ve written about several times one of the things I like best about this hobby is the opportunity to get to interact with fellow DIY’ers and even “co-creating” a little bit with them. A month or so ago I was contacted by a reader called Andy who asked permission to use my STEPS-clone PCB layout as basis for a design with a “de-noisator” circuit that was being discussed on diyaudio. As I’ve already made the STEPS PCB files public there wasn’t too much to “OK” in any case but I was of course grateful to be asked and obviously also a little bit interested in the circuit as well.
The Denoisator-circuit uses a few simply components to improve the noise performance of the LM317, so while the STEPS design was already an improvement on a basic LM317-regulator circuit, it’s quite clear from the performance measurements in the thread that the De-noisator moves the performance bar even higher. And the best things about it are of course that it might actually be a bit cheaper than my original STEPS-version and also that there isn’t a single ultra-tiny, impossible-to-solder, leadless SMD package anywhere 😀
I did briefly consider taking a stab at modifying the layout myself, but I could see more work starting to come up in the horizon and as I did not really need a new PSU design so I begged off. Fortunately Andy decided to take a stab at it himself and it’s quite clear he does know his way around Eagle 🙂 To cut a long story a bit shorter a new design was made, prototype boards were ordered and Andy was gracious enough to send me one of these – and that is what landed in my postbox earlier this week.
I don’t have an immediate application for the board I received from Andy right now, but it’s clear that the next time I have a need for single-supply circuit with enough space in the box there is a decent upgrade waiting in my PCB inventory. And actually, I am now sufficiently intrigued by the “De-noisator” circuit that if I find myself thinking about designing a dual PCB with it as well at some point.