Time to reboot

I'm going to try to merge my (private) project wiki with the public blog. This calls for a new spark-o-licious theme! Pardon the dust while stuff gets added and shuffled around.

The background shot is one of my early attempts to design a modulated flyback driver. Sparks emerge from a tungsten electrode (at the top), striking a piece of highly ordered pyrolytic graphite (at the bottom). The original photo and others from those days are up on Flickr. The coil resonated at around 20 kHz, but the driver was horribly inefficient, requiring heat sinks and turbine fans. I’m having much better luck with the ZVS driver these days.