While we’re 100 years past Edison’s fear, uncertainty, and doubt campaign, the fact of the matter is that DC is a bit easier to wrap one’s head around. It’s just so honest in its directness. AC, though? It can be a little shifty, and that results in some unexpected behaviors, as seen in this video […]
You’ve probably seen Lichtenberg figures before, those lightning-like traces left by high-voltage discharge. The safe way to create them is using an electron beam to embed charge inside an acrylic block, and then shake them loose with a short, sharp tap. The usual technique makes for a great, flat splay of “lightning” that looks great […]
Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it. The answer: it burns bright enough to light up the forest at night, and hot enough to cook food and melt metal. And why on Earth would anybody do […]
If there’s one lesson to be learned from [Aled Cuda]’s pulsed laser driver, it’s that you can treat the current limits on electronic components as a suggestion if the current duration is measured in nanoseconds. The components in question are a laser diode and an NPN transistor, the latter of which operates in avalanche mode […]
If you’ve ever lost gear to lightning or power spikes, you know what a pain they are. Out in rural Arkansas, where [vinthewrench] lives, the grid is more chaos than comfort – especially when storms hit. So, he dug into the problem after watching a cheap AC-DC module quite literally melt down. The full story, […]
Over on his YouTube channel [Ryan Inis] has a video about how electrostatic motors are breaking all the rules. He explains that these days most motors are electromagnetic but suggests that may be changing as the age-old principles of electrostatics are being explored again, particularly due to the limited supply of rare-earth magnets and other materials […]
[mircemk] has been working on wireless power transmission. Using a Class-E Tesla coil with 12 turns on the primary and 8 turns on the secondary and a 12 volt input he can send a few milliwatts to power an LED over a distance of more than 40 centimeters or power a 10 watt bulb over […]
When you think of neon, you might think of neon signs or the tenth element, a noble gas. But there was a time when neon bulbs like the venerable NE-2 were the 555 of their day, with a seemingly endless number of clever circuits. What made this little device so versatile? And why do we […]
If you’re hunting for a bench power supply, you’ll quickly notice options dry up above 48 V or so, and you definitely won’t find a 330 kV supply on the shelf at your local electronics shop. But with just a few parts, [Mircemk] has crafted a high-voltage source from a modified PC power supply that […]
X-ray crystallography, like mass spectroscopy and nuclear spectroscopy, is an extremely useful material characterization technique that is unfortunately hard for amateurs to perform. The physical operation isn’t too complicated, however, and as [Farben-X] shows, it’s entirely possible to build an X-ray diffractometer if you’re willing to deal with high voltages, ancient X-ray tubes, and soft […]