Lamp Brightness Issues

[danielh]

I have built a 16 channel Renard dimmer by joining two 8 channel Renards together.

My problem is as follows.....

The board powers up and I can measure the zero crossing pulse going to the pic, I can measure the crystal freq fine.

When I run vixen with a ramp up the lights go from off to about 3/4 brightness and that is as bright as they get.

I am using the renard-20070812.asm code.

I am also operating with 50hz mains.

If I disconnect the pic from the socket and wire the opto's ground pin to ground the light on the mains side glows brightly, so I know that the opto/triac is working well.
I am using a 3021 opto isolator.

Any help would be absolutely wonderful

Cheers

Daniel

 

[P. Short]

Have you double-checked the maximum brightness level that you can set in Vixen?

What type of lights are you using (wattage and voltage)?

--

Phil

 

[danielh]

Currently running three sets of lights.

One x 240v 60Watt bulb
One x 240v 100 Watt bulb

Vixen settings set to 255

Cheers

Daniel

 

[P. Short]

OK, I asked the questions mostly to make sure that the problem wasn't due to some funny transformer issue or something related to running the SSRs at 24VAC.

While I'm not sure if this version has been tested yet at 50Hz, I would expect that any issues would be related to lower brightness levels, rather than high brightness.

Take a look at the following posts, it may have some relevance.

--

Phil

 

[danielh]

Wahoo I got it going

My first zero crossing detector was only catching the first zero crossing, so only delivering 50hz pulses to the pic not the 100hz for both the zero crossings.

I have also wired up 24v ac and 36v ac transformers and lights the triacs, and adjusted the triac resistor down to 33 ohms. This works brilliantly.

I have attached a very rough drawing of my new zero crossing detector.

Hope it is of some help to someone.

I feel like a kid at christmas