Nick PooleOrdered some little TRACO switching supplies from DigiKey. The 5v units came in an IC tube but the 3v3 units came wrapped up in a little packet of cling wrap like the dimebags of weed I bought in High School.
Looking forward to receiving a shipment of supercaps packaged in the cellophane off a pack of Newports melted shut with a lighter.
Paul
Paul Stoffregen@North Many years ago people using Teensy got burned by those little Traco switchers. The datasheet specifically said extra capacitor at the input (not output) was only needed for higher input voltage. With a resistive load, it worked. But with a non-linear load that draws almost no current until a certain voltage, it would go unstable and create a ~8 volt pulsing output. Maybe they've improved since then. But even if the datasheet says otherwise, I'd add a capacitor at the Traco's input.
@PaulStoffregen Oh damn, thank you for the heads up. I haven't seen any issues so far, but I also kept the big caps from the linear version of this design, so that may be saving me.
I'd like them to be good parts because they're extremely handy.
@North When this happened, the other problem we faced was pretty much everyone (especially a certain well know maker company that rhymes with Toot) assumed all problems are fixed by a bigger output capacitor. But for Traco that made the problem even worse! The capacitor was needed at the input to keep that little Traco from going hog wild.
@PaulStoffregen Oh, that's frustrating. I'll keep that in mind, though.