Hoffman Amplifiers Tube Amplifier Forum

Other Stuff => Electronic Projects => Topic started by: slowferrari on February 15, 2023, 12:47:49 pm

Title: Bridge rectified LED pilot, ground reference?
Post by: slowferrari on February 15, 2023, 12:47:49 pm

I've got a spare 6.3V winding on my transformer, and I was going to bridge rectify it and use it to power a 12VDC led panel indicator (CLR is built in, and sufficiently low to work fine on ~9VDC).

The question is: does the circuit even need a ground reference or can I just leave it all floating? It's a fixed load and only drawing about .001 of the available current, so it doesn't seem like it should matter. Am I wrong?

Not drawing the schematic to avoid an unnecessary attachment, but we're talking about a full wave bridge rectifier with a smoothing cap and an led in parallel across the +/- dc terminals, so I assume we can all use our imagination.

Title: Re: Bridge rectified LED pilot, ground reference?
Post by: sluckey on February 15, 2023, 01:07:38 pm

Since you will be using a separate 6.3v winding you can ground it or not. Makes no difference to the LED. If this LED will be mounted near sensitive preamp level circuits I would provide a ground reference.