Interesting Behaviour.

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

Folks,
I suspect that the design of X-10 Lampmodules (at least, the Magnavox ones)
has changed slightly.

I bought a bunch from Smarthome, and have been modding them to 240V,
without
great success I have to say. A friend more electronically minded than me
(who is, basically, a complete genius in his own lifetime!!) looked at the
circuit, and pointed out that the schematic on Ido Bartani's site didn't
quite match my modules.

We then checked the board over, and were surprised to find that a lot of
the
mods already seemd to be in place: severla of the resistors were already
.5W
versions, rather than .25, the Triac was a 600V rated on, rather than 400.

In fact, the only components which were the "wrong" value for
240V were the
C1 0.68u Cap (should be a .33), R1 (100ohm, should be 220) and the MOV.

When I changed the R1 and C1 values and ratings, it threw the 120khz
oscillator off (it produces 270khz), so I tried swapping >only< the
MOV for
the 275V version.

Hey presto, the module works fine at 240V without any other mods. It gets
warm, but not too bad Being a paranoid person, I won't leave these guys
plugged in unsupervised for a >long> time, but it does seem like the
Magnavox modules are shipping in a 240V capable state (apart from the MOV,
which obviously couldn't ever be rated 275V in a 110V country!)

thoughts?

Ian.



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