DD-1 is hot!

Good evening-

I am curious as to how much heat is typically generated by a Vixen DD-1 controller? I recently acquired one and also purchased an AC adapter from Radio Shack...when powered on, the back of the hand controller seems to get rather hot. Not warm, but hot. I also tried using it with the 8-D cel battery pack and it still heats up quite a bit. Everything functions fine, but I am worried that so much heat can not be good for the electronics. Opinions? (I am clueless about electronics :S )

Thanks-

IIRC, the original battery pack is six AA cells, 9 volts. Other discussions on these type controllers seem to indicate they do not like too much voltage, and tend to instantly self distruct is polarity is not correct.

FWIW

Hi Alan,

Your story sounded familiar, I did a bit of searching on the fourms for "DD-1", and basically found the voltage for the DD-1 has to be no more than 12V as it has a linear regulator inside the unit that drops the voltage to something much lower. The specs for the controller were on the "Company 7" website:

[COLOR="Blue"]Power Input: 7.5 to 12 Volt D.C.
Current Draw: 800 milliamps (maximum)[/COLOR]

So if you Radio Shack adapter is putting out the usual 13V, it would stress the DD-1 regulator too hard. Some of the solutions I saw in other forums talked about dropping the voltage to around 10V using high current dropping diodes. Maybe just using 7 batteries might help. For the eighth battery location, you can use insulating tape to cover a battery's terminals, then wire around it with some 20AWG wire. Other solutions I saw were to get tighter regulated power supplies. But the DD-1 controller will still get very warm, as all linear regulators will unless they have good heatsinking.

Alan Strauss said:

Good evening-

I am curious as to how much heat is typically generated by a Vixen DD-1 controller? I recently acquired one and also purchased an AC adapter from Radio Shack...when powered on, the back of the hand controller seems to get rather hot. Not warm, but hot. I also tried using it with the 8-D cel battery pack and it still heats up quite a bit. Everything functions fine, but I am worried that so much heat can not be good for the electronics. Opinions? (I am clueless about electronics :S )

Thanks-