Re: High brightness white LEDs damaged by custom switcher

"Paul E. Schoen" <pstech@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:463ad110$0$20580$ecde5a14@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
However, someone else was adamant that a PIC would never be as reliable as a
pure analog design

That's a little naive. There are plenty of switching power supply out there
being run by microcontrollers these days, and on ones where it's preventing
catastrophic failure is important, you certailny to see various current
limiting/fail-safe devices... ***just as you do on analog designs, since
there's plenty to fail on them as well***.

and suggested an off-the shelf Linear Tech or other part, which would
involve a complete redesign and loss of the dual brightness feature.

You don't necessarily lose the dual-brightness feature -- somewhere an analog
design still has a reference voltage (or similar) that it's trying to match,
and you can usually find some means of changing that reference, PWMing the
output, etc. to get variable brightness.


.