Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Testing! and ... testing

Things are now in the "debugging" phase. Here are some images of the "completed" product and the power supplies. On the left we have two power supplies (stacked on top of each other) providing 50W of power. On the right the solo power supply is providing 10-12W of power (depending on how I feel while testing) which is providing power solely to the tubes. I have been testing and rewiring parts of the theremin for a few weeks now. One interesting fact to note is that outlets produce a 60Hz signal. I found this out, as well as learned what the capacitor in this circuit directly prior to the speaker is doing, when I found a perfect sinusoidal wave occurring before this capacitor. It turns out this capacitor acts as a high pass filter with is cutoff most likely set around 60Hz to filter out the frequency that is coming from the power supplies. This is capacitor C13 on page one of the schematics (.01μF). Lately during my testing what I have been trying to do is find the signal being generated by the volume oscillator and trace that to the VCO and find where the signal is breaking apart. I think what I will try next is the same signal tracing but this time from the frequency signal generated by the right antennae.

Construction "complete"

After all the soldering has been finished: