High current digital potentiometer?

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
9

Several things:

  1. Your Mosfet was under-rated.
  2. Your Mosfet is not Heat Sinked (Radioshack sells an excellent TO-220 finned heatsink.
  3. Your circuit doesn't have a FLYWHEEL diode to protect the MOSFET from backEMF.
  4. Your breadboard technique is appalling. Try taking a little more time to make it neat.
  5. Try using a better Mosfet like the RFP30N06LE (see attached datasheet).
  6. Try adding a decent heatsink. I don't think the mosfet was damaged by a failure in the breadboard I think it was all the OTHER
    factors .
  7. Try adding a 1N4007 Silicon diode as a flywheel diode across the solenoid coil with the cathode toward the + end and the andode toward the Mosfet.
  8. What are you using for a power supply ?

RFP30N06LE.pdf (189 KB)