You all realize that given our collective knowledge, we could take over the world right?

I still have dibs on New Zealand. Oh, and I want one of those big frickin lasers. (I don't ask for much.)

What? You don't want sharks (or mutated sea bass) with lasers on their heads then?

- Trevor

Nah, just one big frickin laser to play with. That'd be enough.

Nah, just one big frickin laser to play with. That'd be enough.

I was about to make fun of the double-post thing that I saw in two other places on the BBS tonight, and now it just happened to me. I swear I didn't submit the message twice, the BBS is messing up on us tonight.

Well I switched the wires as they were connected to the pot and it didnt help any. In fact I think I may have fried something. I no longer get 763 ohms but about 650 max when I test it.
Maybe Ill hit Radio shack tomorrow and get a new batch of parts that I can ruin.

After all is said and done, I probably could have just bought the pre-made unit and saved myself a lot of trouble!
But this is a learning experience, right? And what $ value can be placed on learning?

OK, so I took the whole damn thing apart, and started over again (using the same components though, except for the .1uf cap and the circuit board).
Apparently my soldering skills have actually degraded since the first time I put this together, so now it looks even more like crap than before.

Now when I do the resistance test on the pot (with it at its max adjustment), the max ohms I get is around 783. And when I test between the mid leg on the VR and ground I get about 420.
So at least its different. Still not right, but at least different.

I think next I'm going to swap out some of the components, and if that fails, Im just going to order this stupid thing pre-made.

Swap out the regulator first.

??

Unfortunately I was unable to get it working with the last rendition of the schematic.

My sister came down to the Cape from Boston the other day (shes an electrical engineer out of MIT) and she helped me with a few things (while also mocking my inept soldering skills).

She pointed out that we had R1 and R2 reversed in the equation we were using. According to the diagram on the voltage regulator package it shoud be Vout = 1.25V*(1+R2/R1). The original website where I found out about this whole thing had it wrong too, so maybe thats where we got it from.
I changed a few things around and starting off with the original basic diagram, eventually got it working.

I changed the 3.3K resistor to a 150 and used a 10K pot instead of a 1K. The 1K only went up to 750 ohms and I just couldnt get it to work with that. I still used the DPDT switch as opposed to the SPDT and I wired in the LED as recommended.
So with this configuration it works perfectly. Wether it should or not I have no idea, but it does.

So then I tried modifying what I had, to the latest version of the schematic by putting in the capacitors and resistors that were reccomended but as soon as I would do that the voltage would drop to almost nothing.
So now Im not sure what to do.
Ive got it working, but with no safeguards.

Maybe I bought the wrong kind of capacitors?

This is what I got to work...

as soon as I would do that the voltage would drop to almost nothing.
... Ive got it working, but with no safeguards.
Maybe I bought the wrong kind of capacitors?

hmmm, caps on the input to ground and output to ground should not affect voltage, just stability, unless they're shorted internally... just about independent on type.

/Michael