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1000W 12V –> 220V Inverter
- actionfromafar 3y agoI think the receptacle looks so scared, because it's about to deliver 220V when it's only rated for 110V?
- codetrotter 3y agoThat’s pretty neat! Also, I was not aware that Instructables.com was owned by Autodesk. Guess they must’ve been acquired somewhat recently.
- mikeyouse 3y agoNot exactly -- almost 12 years ago! https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/autodesk-acquires-instructables#:~:text=BUSINESS%20WIRE)%20%2D%2D-,Autodesk%2C%20Inc.,ideas%20and%20how%2Dto%20information https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de....
- opencl 3y agoThe acquisition was a pretty long time ago but the prominent Autodesk branding at the top of the page is relatively recent.
- jasonpeacock 3y agoThis is one of those "if you don't understand all the words in the article then you should not be attempting it" articles. But it's still fun to read :)
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoDo you think the laborers in china understand all the words in this instruction set when they assemble electronics?
- lokar 3y agoNo, but they are doing it on a line and with tools, parts, training etc provided by an engineer who does.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago[flagged]
- Dylan16807 3y agoWho said anything about approval? Go ahead and learn those words and then attempt what's in the article. Nobody was suggesting otherwise.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y ago[flagged]
- Dylan16807 3y agoNah, "you should understand the instructions before using them" is a self-approval process and it's just advice.
- jandrese 3y agoThey aren't dumb. They are professionals who do this sort of thing for a living. That said, most companies don't etch their own boards. That part of the build process could be skipped by sending your schematic out to one of the boutique board fabrication places. They aren't terribly expensive and it avoids having to deal with nasty chemicals. The article even mentions this and I would highly encourage it myself, at least until you have a few boards under your belt and are feeling more comfortable with diving deeper into the process.
- pjc50 3y agoAssembly carries a different set of risks from powering something up. But as the sibling comment says, the assemblers are skilled technicians. They might lack theoretical background but they will have had a lot of apprenticeship. The EGS002 looks like a really neat subassembly. It's just that at 1kW the safety issues are significant.
- emeraldd 3y agoElectroBoom has entered the chat ... Seriously though, there's enough energy in those numbers to seriously mess you or your electronics up. It's not quite like a bottle of old nitroglycerin, but it's definitely enough energy/power that you must respect it.
- ilyt 3y agoIt's definitely "just buy one", if you just want an inverter. It is nonetheless interesting if you want to build it as component of something more complex, say DIYing a battery bank out of some recycled cells I wonder how many changes would be required to run the whole thing on say 24 or 48V. At glance just powering the board with 12V source and just feeding more to MOSFETS seems to be enough
- deng 3y agoThat's a neat little project, but as almost always nowadays, don't even expect to save any money by building an inverter yourself, unless you have the expensive parts (transformer, mosfets, driver board) lying around anyway. Otherwise, the 30$ mentioned in the article wouldn't even come close to cover all the parts in the list.
- olyjohn 3y agoI have an old wall clock from Japan that runs on 110v/50Hz. It keeps time like all old clocks, using the frequency of power. I can plug it into a US outlet and it runs, but it runs fast, since we're 60Hz here in the US. To remedy this, I bought a 12v power supply, and an inverter from Japan that had the 50/60Hz selectable on it. I couldn't find any other inverters that had an option to run at 50Hz. I get the feeling that the frequency wasn't checked for accuracy / stability, because the clock still eventually goes out of time. My KillAWatt shows something like 51 or 49Hz or something like that. Not good enough to run a clock. Been looking for some other way to get 50Hz AC power... This seems like it could be promising... but I have no idea how stable the frequency will be from a project like this...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jakeinspace 3y agoAre you positive it’s not meant for 100V? That’s the standard in all of Japan from what I know.
- bob1029 3y agoThe voltage doesn't affect the time keeping capabilities. It's based upon grid frequency. I've got one of those US<->Japan xformers I use to run a very special toaster in my kitchen. Doesn't do anything for frequency, but that doesn't matter in my particular case.
- amluto 3y agoI have to admit that I really dislike using ~12V batteries for high power applications like this. I say this having built a ~400A ~14V system. It’s miserable. 1 kW at 100V or 250V or similar uses a nice, small, flexible wire. It can be quite safe because it can be fused or otherwise protected at low currents, which mitigates the risk of welding things, starting fires, or arcing. Ground fault protection, arc fault protection, and general loss-of-isolation protection are available. It’s easy to rework (lever nuts! screw terminals!). 400A (or even 80A or so like in this article) is a whole different ball game. Sure, you have to work hard to electrocute yourself. But you can easily set things on fire or weld things together without coming close to blowing a fuse. And you need to protect both ends of wires in a parallel arrangement. And the wires are enormous, expensive, and hard to terminate. I would much prefer one of three alternative designs to become popular: 1A: a series arrangement of batteries at a civilized 48V or so. You can do this with an aftermarket BMS, but they tend to be janky. 1B: same but actually high voltage (a few hundred V, like an EV) 2: batteries with microinverters and a civilized way to share current. A manufacturer could make a single package with a 1kWh battery, a BMS, a low voltage, low current DC auxiliary output, and a ground-fault and overcurrent-protected 110-250V AC input/output. And an RS485 or 10BASE-T1S or CAN connection so that they can coordinate their I-V characteristics to appropriate distribute charge or discharge current. Now you can connect as many microinverter-batteries as you like in parallel, using #14 wire, to one ordinary circuit breaker per battery plus (depending on the overall arrangement) one big breaker to protect the common bus. edit: Also, with this design, no one, not even the manufacturer, needs to touch a heavy-gauge wire. Everything in the battery would use cheap, painless busbars or small wires, depending on the internal voltage, and the manufacturer could set the voltage however they like. Although 12V internally might be entirely reasonable if the end user also wants to consume 12V at very low currents through the aux output.
- RetpolineDrama 3y ago> 1A: a series arrangement of batteries at a civilized 48V And here I am mad that home-storage server rack batteries are all 48V it seems, but for the same reasons (huge 400+ amp cables required to get decent wattages). When each car charger can do ~14.4kw you need a lot of fat cables running to battery banks
- winrid 3y agoI have a 2kw(?) 12v inverter that I use to power a small welder from my vehicle, it's really useful on the go for repairs.
- m3kw9 3y agoAfter looking at the instructions, most would rather buy
- rlpb 3y agoWhile people are talking about use cases, I've been shopping for exactly this. My Nissan Leaf's DC-DC converter that drops the HV traction battery down to 12V (well, 14.6V-ish) to supply the regular vehicle electrics is apparently 1kW capable, as the heat pump needs a lot of power. If you turn the climate control off but leave the car on, then you can apparently pull 80A or so from the 12V "battery" perfectly fine as the DC-DC converter will keep it supplied. This is a relatively safer way of tapping into the traction battery without having to deal with the HVDC. With an inverter, I could then supply (some subset of) my house from the traction battery, giving me a theoretical 18 hours at 1kW in my case (less efficiency losses).
- rektide 3y agoIt's hard to imagine where one could safely pull 80a from. What kind of busbar that's exposed will have that available to safely draw from?
- rlpb 3y agoFrom the main battery terminals, as far as I understand. I appreciate that this relies on the path from the DC-DC converter to the 12V battery to be sufficient for 80A sustained. Apparently this is fine, but I have yet to look myself. An ICE car can have the battery supply ~200A through that cabling, though of course that's burst and not sustained. But it does suggest to me that it's not out of the question - especially as it's normal in the automotive industry for some cabling to carry such high currents for this reason.
- Faaak 3y ago> as the heat pump needs a lot of power I don't know about leaf's specifics, but most EVs have the heat pump / resistive element wired to the HV battery instead of the 12V one.
- Animats 3y agoCircuit breakers or fuses on both the input and output sides would be a good idea.
- londons_explore 3y agoI don't like the design of the voltage feedback circuit here. It couples the AC side to gnd, and does so through a 100k resistor, which is barely safe (and in my view, any AC that is coupled to gnd isn't sufficiently safe unless it also has leakage detection). It ought to use an optoisolator or even better have leakage detection, which isnt hard to implement in circuits like this.
- bwsd0 3y agoI am not an electrical engineer and stand to be corrected: Commercial inverters for a LiFePO4, gel and lead acid batteries types usually include a micro-controller to monitor and manage the battery's state of charge. These micro-controllers usually employ a multi-stage charging algorithm to derate and prevent the battery from overcharging (which may lead to its eventual destruction). I recently installed a cheap Chinese MUST 1000V hybrid sine-wave inverter with a relatively expensive LiFePO4 battery. Has anyone had success communicating with the RS-232 serial port to monitor this brand of inverter? I am terribly worried that there is a bug in the implementation of the charging algorithm; the officially supported desktop monitoring app is only supported on Windows...
- ohyes 3y agoThis seems like an irresponsible thing to make into an instructable
- megous 3y agoYou can say that about a lot of things. Like anything involving an angle grinder. You can split your face with it into two if it breaks down. Best thing is testing your homebrew inverter using an angle grinder with no protection on either the grinder, or the inverter or your face. The world would be quite boring without some fearless people like these. Though it would have been nice to mention not to buy your mosfets from aliexpress/ebay for $0.8/10pcs (some mosfets are quite pregnant [1]). But looks like one commenter already pointed that out on instructables. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqEDJWVZyh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqEDJWVZyh0
- maxerickson 3y agoYou think a lot of people are gonna casually hand make a PCB?
- ohyes 3y agoNot correctly, which is part of the problem. You all are right, it is unlikely that anyone will actually follow this recipe. I guess I’m taken aback that some pretty serious electrical engineering has been turned into a step by step tutorial with little mention of the potential risks. If an inexperienced person does decide to save some money on an inverter by following these steps (as is implied), it could very quickly turn into “how to electrocute yourself and burn down your house in 10 easy steps.” I would not want to be liable for promoting or hosting such content. Similar to the issue with the “very cool” electric wood burning fad that killed a few people.
- samtho 3y agoElectricity is not to be feared but rather respected. It is a powerful force that lives in our wall, pockets, cars, the air, the ground, and even something that drives our biological function. That being said, this is not going to be someone’s first project. It probably won’t be their second project. I’m not sure my faith in people’s self preservation is rooted in my confidence that people generally want to be safe or some rather bleak, Darwinistic thinking that eventually only those who do projects recklessly will be “selected out.” In any case, you can work on these systems safely and it’s just mains voltage. Humans have introduced more complexity to our lives as our technology has progressed, all with thought-to-be grave safety implications. The advent of the motor carriages had one city making a law stating that someone had to be on foot, waving a flag preceding the motorized vehicle at all times. People love to catastrophize, claim the sky is falling, and wax poetically about how far we have strayed from “the lord.”
- tedk-42 3y agoI think the most important thing to realise is that electricity is becoming a bit like a common tool that _anyone_ should be able to wield to do amazing things. Fire is just as dangerous as electricity, it's just that you can visibly see, feel and smell the danger before being burnt. Electricity is silently dangerous, but education and maybe a bit more safety via simplicity would be really cool to see (e.g. light weight non-intrusive gloves that glow if near electric fields).
- jandrese 3y agoI'm really surprised that board is only $3 given how expensive off the shelf inverters are. I would think there would be enough competition in the pure sine inverter market to drive prices down, but I guess it's just small enough to not function optimally.
- crote 3y agoThe $3 part is only the controller, though. It doesn't actually handle the power itself - it requires extra components for that. It'd be like saying a $100 microwave is expensive because it is controlled by a $0.50 controller chip. The project page itself states that the inverter will cost at least $20 in total - and that's using essentially the cheapest components you can find. Once you use quality components and include things like proper input/output protection, connectors, and a casing, you're likely looking at a $40-50 BOM. A $150-$200 retail price is very fair, considering all the other stuff you need to pay for to actually design, certify, make, and sell a product.
- megous 3y agoJust the tranformer costs at least $250-300 unless you get it second hand.
- samtho 3y agoFor this level of hobby project, there is no need to buy that new. I would either wind my own transformer or (more likely) go to the computer surplus store, get a battery-less UPS and pull the transformer from that.
- merricksb 3y agohttps://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hxjHTYD3p9kJ:https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Pure-Sine-Wave-Inverter/&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hxjHTY...
- mschuster91 3y ago> The MOSFETs I'm using comes in a TO-220 package. The metal tab of the MOSFET is technically tied to its drain pin. Electrical isolation must be applied to avoid conduction between the other sets of MOSFETs. I usually leave the upper MOSFETs from the H-Bridge unisolated as they share a common drain pin (Vcc). Oh holy, that's not good. If the screw threads manage to touch the inner side of the hole of the metal tab, you have electrical connection. Besides that, I don't see a short-circuit protection on there - not sure if the "overcurrent" feedback can handle a dead short before the FETs blow up.
- hulitu 3y ago> 1000W 12V –> 220V Inverter Haha, i wonder how the radiated spectrum of this toy looks like.
- frowin 3y agoClearly, he possesses considerable expertise, but it's puzzling why such a skilled individual would falter towards the end, resulting in poor solder joints on the 2.54mm pin headers. This isn't merely a question of aesthetics; these joints are susceptible to failure. His work is commendable, but I would encourage him to either learn proper soldering techniques or, if he already possesses the skills, to take a moment to use some flux and clean up the joints. It's a simple process that takes just three seconds per joint.
- amelius 3y agoWhy doesn't the title include the efficiency?
- jacquesm 3y agoThe duct tape insulation at the bottom of the heat sink is a pretty bad idea, better use some mica and/or some stand-offs for this. Duct tape has some insulating properties but simply isn't made for this application and given the voltages in play I would definitely not use it. Otherwise: this is a neat little inverter, it's basically a minor variation on the application note for the driver which does all of the heavy (PWM) lifting. If you can't get transformers that are large enough you can put several in parallel using a small series resistance if the output voltage isn't exactly right (usually a case of one winding too many or too little on the secondary (now primary)). Be careful too with those HV caps, those can hold charge for much longer than you might think when they are out-of-circuit. If you can use a higher voltage (48V preferred), and go for a transformerless design because that's so much nicer to haul around (besides being much cheaper).