More smoke, and even a little fire!

I am starting to get pissed off at this.

On Friday, I tried to reprogram the uC in the hopes it would be fast enough and the FETs wouldn't burn up, it wasn't and the highside buck FET caught on fire. So I swapped all of the components onto a second board, except for the FETs I'd burnt up, the inductor and the caps. I started it in this configuration, and prodded the control lines for the FETs to make sure that I was not going to control them into a short, and when I was confident with that. I soldered one more FET on, the one that controls the buck side. So now, it basically had 2 FETs on the buck side that are driven by complementary outputs on the FET driver, and the output FET on the boost side that simply connects the output of the inductor to the output terminal. There is still no way in hell that I can controllably drop a short onto the power supply...

I ran it like this for a few iterations, and it was all looking good...

I soldered in the inductor and switched it on, The highside, buck switch immediately let out the smoke. So I poked it with my continuity meter and found that there is a ground short on the boost side of the inductor...

I am going to change my methodology here a bit, as this is not working. It may mean things take a little longer, but hopefully it will help with my success.

I am going to build my "cabinet" power supply and I will use that to temporarily power this project. As obviously, dropping a dead short over a 10A power supply breaks things, and the cabinet power supply will have current limiting, I could set it to 500mA or so in the hopes that it won't fry stuff.

I will order in some more FETs, I am going through them like nobodies business, and I might not have any spare, I can use those I have on the buck side and get that working first.

I will examine the circuit and make sure that there isn't anything stupid going on that would cause the short (I don't think there is, but you never now)

If I can get the burnt up FET off this board without otherwise damaging it, I will try to see what is causing the short (basically remove components until the short goes away) if removing the FET damages the board, then it becomes time to solder the parts onto the final board. I will be only soldering in the components for the regulator side, and I will be testing for shorts after every single component.

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