Week Four

 Week Four:

25 February 2022

 

Meeting Attendance:

·       Daniel Knight

·       Conor Lambe

·       Itamar Panzo

 

Progress during week four:

During this week we fixed the LM386 mono amplifier by adding a decoupling capacitor to reduce noise from the DC source, and replacing the IC chip. After this, the circuit amplifies the input as expected, with a gain of 20, but similar to the stereo OPA2134 circuit, the output power is not enough to drive the 30W speakers. When using a 32Ω set of headphones (which require less power), however, the audio is amplified as expected with little distortion.

According to the LM386 datasheet, adding resistors and capacitors across the pins 1 & 8 can adjust the gain. We added a 10μF capacitor across these pins, which resulted in a boost of the gain from 20 to 200.

Also, we soldered a copy of the working LM386 circuit onto a stripboard, with the help of a demonstrator, as this is more similar to what would be used in an actual amplifier, rather than a breadboard.

 


LM386 stripboard circuit (wires on right are AC input, ground, VCC from top to bottom)






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