Ah, Come on !! don't be hard on yourself...We all have to start somewhere, and we all continue learnig (sometimes with smoke) throughout our electronics time on this earth....Never give up, and always ask others for help, that way we can all learn together... That is why we are here on this forum...Best of luck....Daniel...

 

Don't give up on regulators. A small heatsink may do.

 

Breaking the circuit, inserting meter and load to measure current.
http://www.sciencebuddies.org/mentoring/project_ideas/Elec_HowToMeasure.shtml

 

the specs in the datasheet of those regulators are stated in in ideal conditions. of course they will deliver the claimed current handling capability provided you tie it to a considerable size of heatsink and provided the reg is not defective. not all brand new units means no defect. if you encounter a fake brand you'll be lucky if its not defective and will last or operate at a considerable time.

but for practical usage i usually derate the current handling capability of the regulator. if it's 500ma max i derate it from 25% to 30% = 350ma to 375ma. from there i base my calculation of my heatsink size. i save from the cost of a heatsink and at the same time i run the reg at a cool pace, eliminating shutdowns and longer life usage of the reg.

moz

 

Thanks folks for the input- feelin' better bout thing this morn... I actually spent much of yesterday going through the volume1 dc tutorials provided on site here, which were very refreshing, I believe I had read through those exact pages a couple of years back but obviously needed the refresher badly! Now back on track with the measurements, fundamental calcs of circuits, etc.

As well, I changed my power config (again) in that I now think it is best to just feed the micro reg system with a 9v alkaline and the rest of the system will get a reduced version of the battery pack (12V ,1.2A)direct,,I've noticed it is a very common solution implemented by many in the past to keep noise and other undesirable symptoms separated from the digital circuits. I'll try to draw up a schematEEK of the complete setup a bit later today and post it later to give folk here a chance to see where I'm going wrong...(maybe I'll start a new thread though.)

As for operating the regs- each of your tips have helped understand them better so thanks for that!

I still have tons of questions about lots of things, but I think I'm ready to get back to work...regards, jd

 

...I still have tons of questions about lots of things, but I think I'm ready to get back to work...regards, jd

Any doubts about regulators and power supplies, feel free to ask me.

 

Thanks for that! I did manage to get quite a few things sorted out after all of that floundering...I still have all sorts of questions but had to move on to other portions of the design- I could have spent many many more hours learning alot more trhan I did.

Right now I am attempting to design and drive the H-bridges. --'borrowing' the design (for the large H) from the radioshack toy proved to be a not so time saving method after all! I am now attempting to better understand how the various design approaches differ and operate so as to be able to design my own tailored to meet the needs of my project- plus will come in super handy to know what I am buiding in the future! The driving part is also a proble due to my lack of programming skills. I am able to read and write some asm, c , cpp and of course basic but my actual program compilation skills have not yet been developed- I usually scoop, borrow and adapt others work for my own needs- this time I really do want to take the time to learn and fully understand what the prog needs to do and write it totally from scratch- a rather large undertaking for my skill-set.

As for the regs-- I will no doubt venture back to this thread again at some point. Thanks again all, jd