I have a problem with the aftermarket HID ballasts on my GL1500 Goldwing motorcycle. They work fine - but the instant draw they impart on the 12 volt bus the instant they start up is causing lockups on microprocessor-run devices also on the bike.
When first powered up, they present almost a dead short for an instant (I assume this is when they are producing the high-voltage pulse to strike the arc). The ballasts are wired directly back to the battery, and yet everywhere else on the bike I am still seeing this pulse. This is a measurement taken from the 12 volt power at one of my microprocessor driven devices. Scale is 0.1v/division, so it's about a 0.4v instantaneous drop:
I have tried everything I can think of to solve this. I've added a ferrite choke to the ballasts to dampen the spike (damping both positive and negative feeds), as well as another choke at the devices being affected. I've tried tons of different sized electrolytic capacitors at the affected devices, including running power through a diode first to prevent draining of the caps back into the bus. Still the pulse is getting through and locking up the devices.
I thought it might be EMI or RFI, so I physically relocated the HID ballast components far away from the devices. The ballasts are already encased in metal cases. I tried enclosing the affected cases in metal cases, with no difference. Now that I write this, I haven't 100% ruled this out by powering the affected devices from a different power source while starting up the HIDs, but my testing thus far (including hooking a coil up to my scope and moving the coil near the affected devices to measure EMI as the HIDs started up) show that there is nothing that should be capable of causing this.
The devices being affected are a custom Arduino device that I designed, and an off-the-shelf dashcam-type DVR writing to a micro-SD card. The Arduino device continues to work, but the LCD processor that runs its display locks up when the spike occurs. The DVR also continue to write to the card, but the video frame processor locks up when the spike occurs, so it just writes the same frame (from the frame buffer, no doubt) out - i.e. the video freezes (although the overlaid clock continues to count).
I'm looking for suggestions or ideas as to how to mitigate this pulse and fix my problem, as I'm out of ideas at this point.
When first powered up, they present almost a dead short for an instant (I assume this is when they are producing the high-voltage pulse to strike the arc). The ballasts are wired directly back to the battery, and yet everywhere else on the bike I am still seeing this pulse. This is a measurement taken from the 12 volt power at one of my microprocessor driven devices. Scale is 0.1v/division, so it's about a 0.4v instantaneous drop:
I have tried everything I can think of to solve this. I've added a ferrite choke to the ballasts to dampen the spike (damping both positive and negative feeds), as well as another choke at the devices being affected. I've tried tons of different sized electrolytic capacitors at the affected devices, including running power through a diode first to prevent draining of the caps back into the bus. Still the pulse is getting through and locking up the devices.
I thought it might be EMI or RFI, so I physically relocated the HID ballast components far away from the devices. The ballasts are already encased in metal cases. I tried enclosing the affected cases in metal cases, with no difference. Now that I write this, I haven't 100% ruled this out by powering the affected devices from a different power source while starting up the HIDs, but my testing thus far (including hooking a coil up to my scope and moving the coil near the affected devices to measure EMI as the HIDs started up) show that there is nothing that should be capable of causing this.
The devices being affected are a custom Arduino device that I designed, and an off-the-shelf dashcam-type DVR writing to a micro-SD card. The Arduino device continues to work, but the LCD processor that runs its display locks up when the spike occurs. The DVR also continue to write to the card, but the video frame processor locks up when the spike occurs, so it just writes the same frame (from the frame buffer, no doubt) out - i.e. the video freezes (although the overlaid clock continues to count).
I'm looking for suggestions or ideas as to how to mitigate this pulse and fix my problem, as I'm out of ideas at this point.
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