Chrontius
Flashlight Enthusiast
I recall seeing a design for a relatively simple Mag hotwire soft-starter using a MOSFET that was designed by someone lacking a scope, resulting in 2 second warmup and minute-long cooldown cycles, and now I'm looking for the circuit diagram and information to build one.
I recall there was one option discussed but never explored, using the stock Mag switch to interrupt current at shutdown, since this brings back the normal switch arcing issues that plague 'dumb' hotwires and anything using NTC. Since switch life on a stock ROP is acceptable to me, reducing the arcing by half is still an improvement - "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". If I can find the plans, and a way to implement this revision, and perhaps a way to cause the switch opening to discharge the time-control capacitor, I think this will be a much easier to use circuit than other MOSFET based soft-starters, built as it was with electrical tape and soldered to the Mag switch tower sans breadboard.
I recall there was one option discussed but never explored, using the stock Mag switch to interrupt current at shutdown, since this brings back the normal switch arcing issues that plague 'dumb' hotwires and anything using NTC. Since switch life on a stock ROP is acceptable to me, reducing the arcing by half is still an improvement - "Perfect is the enemy of good enough". If I can find the plans, and a way to implement this revision, and perhaps a way to cause the switch opening to discharge the time-control capacitor, I think this will be a much easier to use circuit than other MOSFET based soft-starters, built as it was with electrical tape and soldered to the Mag switch tower sans breadboard.
