Haha Hi Pete
I should start out with the idea that this thread is actually intentionally left devoid of text... It was established some time back as a workaround for difficulty with mobile devices to use the gallery. Most of the contextual bits relating to it happen in IRC, hence the seemingly random and scattered nature of the posts. Usually this is used as a quick and easy place for me to put one off pics and concepts... while there's usually a "bigger picture" story behind them, most are works in progress and not much else to go with them.
It's a tradeoff I've had to make to get somewhere with everything... I don't mind answering specific questions about a given pic or set of related pics, just know that out of the gate, most of them in this thread won't have a ready made story to go with them.
That said, I get a lot of my parts as salvage... the whole "one man's trash is another man's treasure" type things. The last pic is absolutely no exception. It's an abandoned Xantrex Freedom 20 inverter that most certainly did let all the magic smoke out at the relay board. The two units below it are it's new guts, with 2 birds in the crosshairs... one of which is itself a salvage from a PC power supply, to get the PFC section out of it. The other might as well be considered a salvage as well LOL... It has had the silicon replaced something like 3 times now over various causes, but the base unit itself was bought new and is one of those "Cheapie via China" supplies rated at 40A/12V (and in its defense, was holding 50 when it originally went bang the first time lol).
It's a ballsy little supply that was tweaked into becoming a full blown (no pun lol) CCCV battery charger (with float, and originally was going to have EQ as well, just never made it to the protoboard because of real estate issues).
It has 2 problems however... It's a raging bull in a fine china shop, and used the traditional doubler/NTC on the front end, with not only inadequate filtering but anemic components in what *did* exist. The result was, really crap PF, and radiated so much hash that it causes total mayhem with things like Dallas 1 wire bus (temp probes), analog feedback loops (fan/blower speeds), battery monitors, etc yada blah... the 1 wire effects were so strong that during tests for the new PFC arrangement, it crashed the driver for the 1 wire bus and forced me to have to reboot the Pi (losing a respectable 257 day and counting uptime). I wasn't happy.
So the idea here is to put the new layout in the donor box where the EMI can be effectively contained, and give it PFC so the generator doesn't have to work as hard to charge the batteries when I need to run it.
By extension, the answer to the "which is it" question... "Both" LOL... My trade is electronics and computers, the latter I've bailed on over "creative differences" with the rest of the world... I swerved some time back away from hunting viruses and spyware (before the collective "malware" was coined) and taken a liking to open source, Raspberry Pi, and recently, Arduino.
Magic smoke, well, I'm no stranger to the various perfumes that our world now runs on... the overall goal is of course to cause as few leaks as possible personally, witness as many as possible that have the "other" box checked in the fault section, and learn from both cases LOL.
That said, no, I can't take credit for the one in the above pic, nor did I witness it, but it had to have been notable to someone - the board that sat over that is... how you say... "crunchy"? LOL
I'll also add, since we're at it... One variety of red LED was particularly foul in the big picture... and certain MOSFETs emit an absolutely *beautiful* (albeit brief) hue of cobalt blue when provoked. Neither forgettable... haha
I'll leave it to you to figure out how to make those memories... (hint: they both make a fair 'snap' when they happen)
Steve