Question about DLM warp board

[clactonite]

Can anyone out there help!
I am in the process of building up a 22" TOS enterprise, all was going well with the DLM warp lighting, the strobe and running lights worked perfectly until... I added the warp nacelle boards. The warp chase effect works great but the strobe and running lights are running much faster now that they are attached. After taking the round chaser circuits off the other flashers worked perfectly again. I have checked what I have done but can't for the life of me see what I have messed up!
I have also wired up some white LED's for the secondary hull and these "pulse" slightly with the warp units on, can anything be done to stop this?
I am no electonics wizard and this is my first attempt at lighting a model so any help would be greatly appreciated,

Clactonite

[DLMatthys]

Now that you have it all together and it all works your skill sets earns you an upgrade to EXPERT, Congratulations.

I have knowledge about the steady on diming of the interior lamps. This evens out after all LEDs with thier resistors or lamps are in place from bow to stern. Use the pads for lamps in the primary hull lights on the main WWB board. The Diode D1 dulls that spiking a lot. Also adjusting the two pots R3 and R9 when at full load. Send me a report whith comments on resuts

Another note about the Warp discs...If you want to add more color to the dome rotating effects. Replace one of the yellow disc LEDs with Green at the 10 O'clock. Use a low bright blue LED at the 2 O'clock.

I found one at www.digikey.com #67-1748-ND $2.23
SS-LX3044USBD LED 3MM BLUE/BLUE DIFF LENS

Other blue LEDs seam way to bright. You would have to use a resiter in seies in the 150 to 300 ohm range to dim it.

[clactonite]

Don,
thanks for the reply.
Reasonably competent at following well laid out instructions yes, an EXPERT, no way!
I have it all rigged up but the flashers and strobe are going way too fast. They were fine without the warps soldered but once they were on both the strobe and runing lights started flashing like mad!
I thought I may have the potentiometers positioned wrong but trying them differently made no difference. I did substitute the yellow and orange warp leds for 50ma ones (the only ones I could get here in England) would these make a difference?
Anyway, any suggestions would be much appreciated,
Clactonite

[Sparky]

It seems like the chaser circuit is either:

1) using just a little more power than the power supply can generate/source

2) or there is clock 'noise' coming down the power lines from the chaser circuits.

The first thing to try is a heftier power source. If its a transformer aka wallwart get one with more current (same voltage) if its batteries, then you could try another battery in parallel. Temporarily this is ok, but don't use it run time like this, since as the batteries discharge slight differences in them will cause some electrical issues that boil down to an increased likely hood of one or both the batteries leaking. Leaky batteries eat wires and circuit boards.

If this doesn't help then you will need to try a filter cap on the power lines to the nacelles, to eliminate the clock noise which we can talk about later, so don't worry about it now.

[DLMatthys]

Tony sent some pictures of the boards. I think what causes that noise was that one metal "Can" transister T3 replaced the kit provided resin transiters. From my past experiance with the can types got hot on this circuit and mayby drew a lot of current? Also sugested is to have a AC wall converter rated at 700 to 800 ma.

Sparky....I am pretty sure there still some clock noise when everything is hooked up and powered up. Trim pots all tweaked into place to suit the builders eye.

I would like to know how to eliminate clock noise altogether???
Please do tell.

[macfrank]

I would like to know how to eliminate clock noise altogether???
Please do tell.

I haven't seen your circuit, but a 4.7uF Tantalum in parallel with a 0.1uF cap to ground at the power supply input to the board would be a place to start by eliminating noise coming in from the power supply. If you're using TTL ICs, replace them with CMOS or 74HC devices. Ideally you want to bypass every IC at or very near their power pin with a 0.1uF cap to ground. You definitely want to bypass the IC generating the clock signal, and make sure that the clock trace doesn't run near power or ground lines.

[Sparky]

The engineering way to figure the filter cap it is to measure the frequency coming back down the line and put it into this formula:
0.159 / (frequency) = Capacitance

I believe this the correct formula, been a long time.

But the general filter rules for TTL circuits macfrank listed is a good place to start. you can always spot an old computer card by those tiny yellow Tant caps across the ICs. Used to be able to get IC sockets with these caps embedded in the socket.