Electric OU: Tar Baby with 555 INSTEAD of Function Generator

Using IRF830a mosfets for experimentation: I would rather blow a one dollar mosfet than a six dollar one while sorting things out. But…. as the previous video “These Magic MOSFETs” demonstrated… if I didn’t tell you, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference by looking at the scope traces or the load heat parameters. The 555 timer is wired in the basic astable mode, with a swappable 0.1 uF timing cap, a 100 k pot and a 1 k resistor in the timing circuit. It’s a basic pulse generator, and it generates pulses. And these pulses drive the gates and/or bias the sources of the TarBaby mosfets, very much as the FG does. It would be good to have an attenuator; this can be done by lowering the supply voltage to the 555 (It will run on from about 6 volts to 15 or so without too much stress) but better would be a series pot in the pin 3 output to the gate. Right now I’m using no attenuation in the output, just dumping the raw Pin 3 into the Tar Baby.

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