A simple oscillator circuit that varies the duty cycle over a wide range without affecting the frequency. It is a variation of the simple 555 astable oscillator. Initially, I told a reader that there was no standard 555 circuit that could do this, but then the grey matter started working. The use of an air-variable capacitor for frequency
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control is a mind-blower ”nothing short of a time warp! When potentiometer R1 is centered, operation is obvious and the duty cycle is 50%. However, as R1 is rotated in either direction the charge time and discharge times vary accordingly. The two sides of R1 have independent steering diodes (D1 & D2). C1 & C2 make up the timing capacitor. Pins 2 & 6 of the 555 are the upper and lower thresholds of the input comparators. The charge /discharge voltage is taken from pin 3 because it has rail-to-rail voltage swing, and the open collector output (pin 7) cannot do this. The rectangular waveform output is taken from pin 7 instead. R3 is the pull-up resistor. If constant frequency is desired, C1 could be padded for the correct frequency. However, most experimenters also want variable frequency. Since R1 cannot be varied in total resistance, it cannot vary the frequency. R2 could vary the frequency, but would also affect the duty cycle ratio limits as well. The only practical means of obtaining variable frequency is to vary C1. So we have a charge resistance and a discharge resistance, the sum of which is constant and equal to the R1 potentiometer total resistance (1 to 3). Therefore, the sum of the charge and discharge times is also constant. Since F = 1/T, the frequency is also be constant. The old-fashioned air variable capacitor is old and klunky. While DigiKey offers no such product, these devices remain available on eBay as...
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