Hi Alan,
Your story sounded familiar, I did a bit of searching on the fourms for "DD-1", and basically found the voltage for the DD-1 has to be no more than 12V as it has a linear regulator inside the unit that drops the voltage to something much lower. The specs for the controller were on the "Company 7" website:
[COLOR="Blue"]
Power Input: 7.5 to 12 Volt D.C.
Current Draw: 800 milliamps (maximum)[/COLOR]
So if you Radio Shack adapter is putting out the usual 13V, it would stress the DD-1 regulator too hard. Some of the solutions I saw in other forums talked about dropping the voltage to around 10V using high current dropping diodes. Maybe just using 7 batteries might help. For the eighth battery location, you can use insulating tape to cover a battery's terminals, then wire around it with some 20AWG wire. Other solutions I saw were to get tighter regulated power supplies. But the DD-1 controller will still get very warm, as all linear regulators will unless they have good heatsinking.
Alan Strauss said:
Good evening-
I am curious as to how much heat is typically generated by a Vixen DD-1 controller? I recently acquired one and also purchased an AC adapter from Radio Shack...when powered on, the back of the hand controller seems to get rather hot. Not warm, but hot. I also tried using it with the 8-D cel battery pack and it still heats up quite a bit. Everything functions fine, but I am worried that so much heat can not be good for the electronics. Opinions? (I am clueless about electronics :S )
Thanks-