Coarse/Fine Potentiometer adjustment

For many electronic projects you need potentiometers with very fine adjustment range.
But sometimes you need a coarse adjustment instead. Now what happens if you need both
at once? This is for example the case for many regulated laboratory bench power supplies
and the standard approach is to use high precision 10-turn-potentiometers which are
cheap and economi c, but sometimes hard to find in the desired resistance. Another
drawback is that they don't allow to turn down the setting very fast if pani c is at hand.
Every person that worked with high power supplies learned sooner or later that things
burn up quite qui ck at high Amperes or Voltages and you might run into the case that you
have to shut down the voltage or current limit very quickly. A possi ble solution is to add
separate coarse/fine potentiometers stacked in serial (or I-shape connection). You can
use standard (linear) potentiometers which are cheap and available in many different
resistances.

Standard Coarse/Fine in serial or Ishaped connection

The typical coarse/fine arrangment has the drawback that the influence of the fine
resistor is zero at one end of the scale and the total resistance of the serial arrangement
vari es by the amount of the fine potentiometer (I used an example with 1k1 total
Resitance and approx 10:1 coarse/fine ratio. The total rsi stance for thi s examples vari es
from 1100 Ohm to 1000 Ohm, depending only on the fine potentiometer setting (note that
R1/R2 and R3/R4 model the contrary hal ves of the potentiometers in these example
schematics).
You can see easil y in the chart below that thi s configuration has a nice fine regulation
range of approx. 10% at the upper end but zero at the bottom end. The blue lines depict
the voltage at the div(i der)-output in rel ation to the input voltage for 0%, 50% and 100%
fine setting over the coarse setting (in percent). The orange lines show the total
resistance of the configuration for 0%, 50% and 100% fine setting.
Fine adjustment range over coarse setting for typical I-shaped coarse/fine
potentiometers:

Extended Coarse/Fine with dual gear

(stereo) fine potentiometers in serial
or I-shaped connection

As also other poeple faced this problem, there is a perfect solution for thi s problem. As
Jonathan G.Thwaits published in hi s [ blog ] you can make a perfect 10% fine adjustment
using a dual gear potentiometer for the fine part and connect one gear on top of the
coarse potentiomer and the inverse half below. The total resistance does not even vary
with this ingenious approach. The only drawback remains in the price and availability of
dual gear potentiometers.
Fine adjustment range over coarse setting for dual geared I-shaped coarse/fine
potentiometers:

Coarse/Fine with standard

potentiometers in H-shaped
connection

If you want to avoid the problems of pri ce and availability of dual gear potentiometers,
there is a solution by putting standard (single gear) potentiometers in a H-shaped
configuration. The drawback with thi s connection is that the total resistance varies

unlinearly (from 1100 Ohm down to 910 Ohm for thi s example) but if your schematic is
insensitiv to the total resi stance, this should be a possi ble way to go. (Note that R5/R6
are fixed resistors and no potentiometer).

Fine adjustment range over coarse setting for H-shaped coarse/fine potentiometers:

I used thi s connection for the voltage adjustment in my [ 30V/10A bench power supply ]
desi gn and also measured the actual fine adjustment range:

The same method was used for current limiter fine adjustment but with changed resi stor
values. The total resistance is 180 Ohms, varying down to 134 Ohm in the extreme
settings.
Fine adjustment range over coarse setting for H-shaped coarse/fine potentiometers:

Thi s vari ant was al so measured in practi ce for the fine adjustment range:

The divergence between the calculation and the measurement stems probabl y from the
other parts connected in parallel to the potentiometer H-shape.