I have found myself needing some more in the way of High Voltage supplies of late, with the acquisition of the new He-Ne laser tubes, so I went trawling eBay for something that would be suitable to run these tubes. (I currently only have a single He-Ne laser PSU brick,
Inkeeping with everything else in my shack being low voltage operated, I had planned from the outset to convert the desoldering station to 12v operation. It turns out this has been the easiest tool to convert in my shack so far. The factory SMPS is a fairly straightforward 18v 12A
Here is a simple 555 timer based flyback transformer driver, with the PCB designed by myself for some HV experiments. Above is the Eagle CAD board layout. The 555 timer is in astable mode, generating a frequency from about 22kHz to 55kHz, depending on the position of the potentiometer. The