I gave another talk at Ada’s Technical Books: this time about the (nearly completed) Tesla gun. The audio isn’t perfect, and it very tragically ends just before the spectacular spark demonstration, but here it is:
See more photos in Ada’s Flickr pool.
What better way to ring in the new year than with a 3d photobooth that auto-posts to Flickr?
May your 2012 be full of joy… and SCIENCE!
Build details to follow… After the party. ^_^
To celebrate the season this year, I got together with some friends to make gingerbread houses.
My contribution: Gingerbread Wardenclyffe, with real lightning action!
(compare to this reference photo)
The HV was provided courtesy of 3ricJ’s 1930s diathermy device.
Happy high voltage to you and yours this holiday season!
After tragically melting my previous HV switch, and given that a 15kV multi-ampere switch isn’t exactly something you find at Radio Shack, I’ve had to resort to more drastic measures. It was time to make one from scratch.
And when I say scratch, I mean mud. And by mud, I mean porcelain.
The fine folks at Metrix CreateSpace had just to tools I needed: a 3D powder printer to make a slip cast mold, and a kiln to fire the clay into porcelain. After a couple of revisions, I settled on something vaguely resembling a cooling tower. This will let me install a tiny turbine in the bottom to pull out hot ions, while using a minimum amount of material for the switch itself.
Install some tungsten welding electrodes (held in place with high temperature silicone) and voila: a handy switch capable of handling a couple of kilowatts at 15+kV!
Did I mention that, given the incompressibility of porcelain and the shape of the cooling base, it is perhaps a little loud?
Here’s a great article on the importance of deflocculants and specific gravity in maintaining your slip suspensions. A more modest title might be, “How to keep your mud pourable, but not too wet.”
Yes, every technical field has its own funny words. I never thought I’d need specific words to describe the goopiness of mud, but here we are…
A friend pointed out that it’s been ten years this month since I wrote an article about a particularly infamous DIY Wi-Fi antenna.
While it was never a particularly efficient antenna, it served as an inspiration for wireless geeks for the better part of a decade.
Happy anniversary!
I’ve made a little progress with the mini-coil. I have two flyback drivers up and running. Each circuit fits nicely inside a 2″ ABS cup potted with silicone, now dubbed the hockey puck of DOOM.
One flyback charges a capacitor bank, and is held open by the trigatron. I’m not sure when these actual trigatrons where manufactured, but they’ve been available since the 1940s.
The trigatron acts as a very quiet, easily controlled spark gap switch. When the second flyback turns on, it closes the switch, dumping the charge in the capacitor bank across the primary of the Tesla coil.
When actually operating, both coils will charge the bank in parallel, and the trigatron will be fired with very precise timing using a solid state ignition coil.
I’m working on a small Tesla coil project. After hours of winding and letting the polyurethane cure, there’s nothing quite like the thrill of finding the resonant frequency of your secondary + top load… 423 kHz for this little guy!
The frequency generator was a donation to the Unit. The scope is a DSO Nano v1. More updates to come…
I scored 15 bytecoins at Metrix CreateSpace yesterday. What are they worth?
Well, I’ll tell you what I paid for them. I traded a shrunken Susan B. Anthony dollar for a 10-byte note, and a shrunken quarter for a 5-byte note. That puts the direct exchange rate at about 10:1 (B:$). We agreed that since they were shrunken coins, it established a fair “proof of work”.
But it gets more complicated than that. The going eBay rate for a shrunken dollar is about $21 for a $1 Sacagawea. That puts the exchange rate at roughly 1:2 (B:shrunken $).
Money is complicated.
I think I’ll hang my bytecoins on the wall and watch them appreciate… That seems like the fiducially responsible thing to do.
Also: Happy 99th Birthday, Alan Turing!
Here’s a very nicely done DIY liquid nitrogen generator from Ben Krasnow, the guy who brought you the DIY scanning electron microscope.
Great build!
I'm Rob Flickenger. I like to hack on things. I sometimes write about my adventures here.
I'm easy to find online, but in case you're having trouble:
