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• troubleshooting...
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  I tried building this over the weekend with parts from mouser, straight from the list in the article, but with a few substitutions (the LED is 3.7v instead of 3.5) and I used a regular diode for the battery part, because the Shottky diode Mouser send is huge and looks nothing like the one in the magazine article.
  
  It doesn't work.
  
  I have de-soldered everything and re-assembled with a fresh transistor, in case I cooked the original. I swapped the 1K resistor for a 2.2K. I tried hooking up an AA battery to + and - to see if it was not getting any power. The LED works fine if you put 3+ volts straight through it, but the joule thief part is not working, and I can't see the problem. As far as I can tell, everything looks just like the photos in the article, and I've run through the schematic over and over again, as well as taken the thing apart and put it back together several times.
  
  What are the common goof points (if any?)
  BTW, the solar battery part, which I soldered as a 6 pointed star with the photodiodes at each vertex, is putting out 27mV under the fuorescent shoplights, according to my crappy voltmeter - is that enough to drive the circuit once I get the joule thief part working?

  Posted by npkeith on December 07, 2009 at 07:04:56 Pacific Time