09-29-2025 07:44 AM
I know this is a 5 year old topic but would a DC to DC converter work?
I can make the voltage divider easily but after that my circuits knowledges falls apart.
Jason
09-29-2025 08:47 AM - edited 09-29-2025 08:50 AM
@Jason93 wrote:
I know this is a 5 year old topic but would a DC to DC converter work?
I can make the voltage divider easily but after that my circuits knowledges falls apart.
Jason
I don't think such a DC-DC converter would be suitable (but it depends) — it looks more like a power supply for me. Let me share a funny story from my experience.
In one system, we needed to trigger a 9401 module using a 24 V signal. Our engineering team provided me with a "converter," specifically a Wago DC-DC converter 24V to 5V. The goal was to trigger the 9401 with low jitter — meaning the delay from the rising edge of the 24 V signal (coming from an ultrasound sensor) to the 5 V TTL trigger should be no more than 500 µs.
The DC-DC converter's datasheet mentioned something like "20 kHz," and the engineer claimed it was fully suitable and in theory fast enough from a timing point of view. For practical testing, I used a 24 V output from a cRIO module (NI-9472, I believe), generated a 24V pulse train of a few kHz, and tried to capture the input train on the 9401 after the converter. I counted the pulses to check for missed edges and to measure jitter (the cRIO used had a 40 MHz FPGA onboard).
The naive experiment didn’t last long. When the 9472 module started (and then finished) smoking, I opened the DC-DC converter and finally understood what "20 kHz" meant: it was the internal switching frequency of the converter. What a shame for someone with an M.Sc. in Physics!
My pulse train had created a huge resonance with the converter’s internal oscillator, resulting in a high back-voltage that propagated to the 9472. This caused physical damage to the module, and ~200 Euros went straight into the trash bin.
Luckily, both the cRIO and the 9401 survived this "noob" experiment.
Lesson learned: Never use a 24 V to 5 V secondary power supply as a signal converter.
09-29-2025 09:45 AM - edited 09-29-2025 09:47 AM
@Andrey_Dmitriev wrote:Lesson learned: Never use a 24 V to 5 V secondary power supply as a signal converter.
Sounds like your real problem was it was a switching power supply. If it was a linear regulator, you may have been fine. But that is a large voltage drop for a regulator to handle.
With that said, I would likely use a voltage divider and an op-amp in a voltage follower for this application.
09-29-2025 09:51 AM
A DC-DC converter? That's like using a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito.
A basic level shifting circuit or IC is all that is needed.
You can get bi-directional level shifter IC's for pennies these days.
09-29-2025 10:04 AM
Should have used something like PLC-OPT- 24DC/ 5DC/100KHZ-G - Solid-state relay module - 2902972 | Phoenix Contact