Hacker Friendly

This was a fun 20-minute project: A tiny Jacob’s Ladder made from an LCD backlight inverter, powered by USB. The ladder itself is made from a piece of 24AWG wire harvested from a scrap of CAT5. It makes sparks just a few millimeters wide, but they do climb very rapidly!
Rather than tempt fate and […]

 

For the last several weekends, I’ve been working on building my first spark gap Tesla coil from the ground-up. After many long nights and blown capacitors, it finally worked!
This is the story of how I came to build one of these remarkable, expensive, loud, dangerous, and incomparably cool high voltage toys.
WARNING: If you find yourself […]