Add A Circuit breaker to my project

Other Hardware General Electronics
1

Hi,

I am trying to complete a project that controls the dimness of a light bulb using a mosfet. I am following this tutorial. There are many faults in my circuit which lead to short circuit and trips the circuit breaker.

Can I add a circuit breaker to MY circuit? My room's breakers range from C6 - C10 . I tried to add a circuit breaker to my circuit (C6) which failed in both room (having C6 and C10 breakers). Both the breaker in my circuit and the pre-installed breaker tripped. Is there a way out?

Add one more question, do you think the tutorial I am following is correct. Can I achieve my goal with that tutorial? Are there any other suggestions?

Thanks in advance

2

  1. if you don't know what you're doing, don't mess around with high voltages.
    Unless you don't have children yet, in which case go ahead as it may give you a nomination for the Darwin Awards. Just make sure that when you kill yourself you don't kill anyone else with it. Killing yourself with your own stupidity is one thing. Killing others is a whole different level.

  2. fix the faults in your circuit, check, double check and triple check before even considering to connect it to the high voltage outlet.

3

Hello arushgupta,
Welcome to the forum.

I share the concerns of wvmarle, you are messing with mains and clearly don't know what you are doing. The circuit in the Instructables article shows the light bulb in series with the electronics. This configuration should protect the supply against most mistakes you could make in the electronics; if your circuit is a complete short then the current will be limited by the bulb and stop the circuit breaker from tripping. The fact that the breaker trips suggests you are doing something very dangerous and don't realise it. Please, put your circuitry in a box and put it away in the garage or loft. Then, experiment with electronics using low, safe voltages. When you feel you understand electronics much better (in maybe 5 years time) open the box and look at what you made. Only when you look at the contents of the box and are utterly horrified and scared at how close you came to killing yourself can you consider you know enough about electricity to mess with live mains.

I'm being serious.

4

PerryBebbington:
The fact that the breaker trips suggests you are doing something very dangerous and don't realise it.

Agreed. I should have added that point as well. If a breaker trips, you're doing something wrong. When playing with mains voltages, that something is probably pretty dangerous as well. A shock from mains hurts, big time, and that's the least you get of it. That 100µF cap in the circuit is another potential killer, as it contains a lethal charge for a long time - and that's DC, even worse. Your home circuit breaker is there for a reason. It prevents your house from burning down if you create a short, for example.

There are lots of ready-made dimmer boards out there. Some require phase cutting and you handling the timing, others have a small microcontroller on board and take a PWM input, the on-board controller handling the actual phase cutting. Much safer to use, even though you still have to keep your wits to it as those boards have lots of exposed mains power points.

5

A circuit breaker would not stop that thing from quite literally blowing up in your face. I’m being serious here, you’re out of you safety zone with mains voltage. Stop now, before you get hurt.

Yet another Instructable built and published by an absolute idiot. The author of that piece of nonsense used a small breadboard to build a 230 volt mains connected circuit. Sure, that’s safe. /sarc

I honestly wonder how long it will take before that website is sued out of exsistance by the parents of some unfortunate Darwin award winner for the unchecked, pure garbage they put on the web.