How expensive is that equipment, i remember my friend frying one in highschool
Those analog ones aren't that costly anymore... dunno, maybe a few hundred euros. We have a few digital ones that were around 20.000€ a piece, like a year ago. And that's already with percentage off cuz University and stuff. The old and cheap ones are good enough for the stuff I do atm.
and what is that, explain to people like me ( dum dums).
Well, basicly it's a simple voltage pulse of 15V. But it's like really short which is one of the tricky parts... as you can see it's around 700 nano seconds long (700*10^-9 seconds/that's way less than a blink of an eye). It's just for testing a certain sensor setup.
I am using my microcontroller, which supplies me with 3,3V, to switch my circuit I built which then provides me with the 15V pulse I need.
Basicly, I built a really fast switch
The spectacular part is actually the really sharp edge and that there is no oscillation after turning it on and off again. The overall sharpness of the pulse is just beautiful. I am just excited cuz I didn't expect that my quick'n dirty solution would work that nice.
On Thursday I am planning to half the time of the pulse. Hopefully down to something around 400ns.
Mathematically it's sweet when you just take a look at the edge. Let's assume that the raise of the voltage happens in something like 35ns, which is probably still too long compared to the real pulse, that means the voltage makes a jump from 0V to 15V in that time window:
That already equals 0,395V per ns. Soooo sweet...
If I can half the pulse time, I doubled the Voltage per ns! Probably doesn't sound that spectacular but it actually is, considering I build all that with parts that sum up to 25cents or something