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BarsMonster
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PWM & output voltage

while 555 contest is long gone, I am still debugging my device, where I already abandoned 555 itself :-)

At the moment, I am driving PC FAN from an PWM (30kHz) signal from atmel uC.

I am powering P-MOSFET with a simple 1-BJT-transistor-"driver". Output is filtered with an 22uH inductor + 330uF cap. Surely I have kickback diode in place.

The problem I have is while I have 256 "levels" of PWM, I am getting most of output difference somewhere in the 1-20 range. It looks like even short pulses have the "power" to drive the FAN at full power.

  1. How can I make it "less" powerful? Will I have more powerful fans underpowered then?

  2. On the drain of the mosfet I see some 1-3Mhz ringing with some 5V amplitude, and while it all works, I don't like it (no ringing on the source or gate). What causes it and how should I fight it?

Update: R1 - 1kOhm R2 - 47Ohm MOSFET - is PMOSFET from motherboard Diode is some medium-size Schottky one, with 0.2V drop.

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BarsMonster
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