That was a hard ride. So much had to be learned in such a short time but there is light at the end of the road.

The new pulseboard is mostly finished (some details are still missing like ground via stitching etc). It is a 4 layer PCB with power and ground planes.

It has some pins to add fans and a trimmer poti to adjust the feedback voltage. A 3.3v zener diode protects the ESP pin from wrong settings at the poti.

It is a high side gate driver that is rated for 200v max. With the adjustable feedback voltage the range of the voltages that can be used shifted dramatically. The PWM is isolated with a high speed optocoupler. ( The vSense feedback still isn't )

The first voltage divider design used fixed resistor values and that limited the range to 30-60v. Now it can be 30-200v.

Just a few weeks ago I had zero knowledge about PCBs at all and soldered some prototypes with wires and perfboards. At some point I got sick of it and tried to order the boards online. That wasn't as easy as thought. So much options and new technical terms. And the pricing was insane. I gave up on the idea until someone gave me a few sites that have a good name and are easier to use. I decided to give PCBway a try and the website helped me a lot to understand what gerber files are and what is needed to get a PCB. They also offered tutorials about how to create the files with kicad. Perfect.

That's why I decided to pack the PCB files in the projects final release according to the requirements of this specific vendor. This decision was long ago. Now PCBway offered me free prototyping and I'm very glad about it.

Big thanks to PCBway.

Stay tuned: