Lets say I have a resistive heater which I want to digitally set how hot it is. It’s a simple constant resistance heater. What system does one employ to transform an integer in my Baby-O’s app into a variable voltage/current level being fed to a fixed resistive load? Lets say 4 bits and 16 heater levels.
Or, is the smarter path to always feed the resistive heater a constant voltage, but vary the temperature with PWM? This seems noisier with all the switching required.
In either case, I have to go from the low-power AVR port to something capable of some delivering some more substantial milliamps. Is a FET circuit the solid state answer to that?
If you want to do it at all efficiently, some kind of PWM is the way to go. If your heater does not need to respond really quickly, your frequency can be just a few Hz or less. What kind of current are you talking about?
You don’t need bidirectional current, so a bidirectional motor drivers like the ones we sell would probably be overkill for your application. You could just use a MOSFET controlled by one of the Baby Orangutan’s hardware PWM lines (or even with a slow software PWM on an arbitrary I/O line).
