MCLR resistor

[The Master]

Very strange then. Im only switching 240V max. The smoke machine has the highest rating at 750W but most of that is for the big heating coil and so the relay shouldnt have much to deal with at all. Using a triac for the smoke machine is definately helping. Its hardly reseting itself at all now. The solenoid seems to be working fine and in about 500 operations has only caused a reset once. Im going to replace the 10K resistors with a plain wire and see how things go then. A teacher at my old school said 10K might be too much and MCLR isnt getting enough power.

The real test will come in a few hours when i try running 3 smoke machines, 1 strobe, 1 solenoid and about 20 LEDs from it at the same time.

BTW, when you say "purely on/off", what else could it do?

[Melanie]

Oh... and in the board above, MCLR is strapped directly to Vdd. There's more to it than first meets the eye... careful positioning of components, ground-plane around the PIC and little ditties like that all come together to produce a solid bullet-proof final product.

> BTW, when you say "purely on/off", what else could it do?

By varing the firing angle you use Triacs to dim lighting for example. It's actually VERY EASY to switch Triacs badly, and so create heaps of noise and inductive nightmares (kinda apt for halloween).

[The Master]

I dont understand that. Do you mean like PWM? That is still on/off. The person who gave me that diagram also made me some boxes. Each one accepts serial input and uses PWM to fade the outputs. Im already using these for some of the lights but when he made them he warned me not to connect any transformers or even UV lights. Im wondering if connecting a strobe would damage them. If not then i dont have to have to strobe on my circuit at all.

What is the worst that could happen? The internal chip is protected by optoisolators and each output is fused. I accidentally blew a triac once (under normal use) and it was hard to replace. All 8 triacs are rivveted to the side.

What do you mean by ground plane? Is that just a lot of grounded copper on the PCB? This circuit is running from a breadboard. I will make something more profesional next year when i have time and equipment.