DIY Ionizer Clears The Air On A Budget

January 12, 2020 by Dan Maloney 65 Comments

Have you ever had a good, deep breath of the air near a waterfall, or perhaps after a thunderstorm? That unmistakably fresh smell is due to ionized air, specifically negative ions, and many are the claims concerning their health benefits. A minor industry has sprung up to capitalize on the interest in ionized air, and while [Amaldev] wanted to clean up the Mumbai air coming into his home, he didn’t want to pay a lot for a commercial unit. So he built his own air ionizer for only about $10.

When [Amaldev] dropped this in the Hackaday tip line, he indicated that he’d been taking some heat for the design from Instagram followers. We imagine a fair number of the complaints stem from the cluster of sewing needles that bristle from one end of the PCB and are raised to 6,000 volts by a fifteen-stage Cockcroft-Walton multiplier. That’s sure to raise eyebrows, or possible the hair on one’s head if you happen to brush by the emitters. Or perhaps [Amaldev]’s critics are dubious about the benefits of ionized air; indeed, some commenters on the video below seem to think that the smoke in the closed jar was not precipitated by the ion stream as [Amaldev] claims, but rather somehow was settled by heat or some other trickery.

Neither of those bothers us as much as the direct 230-volt mains connection, though. We’d have preferred to see at least an isolation transformer in there, or perhaps a battery-powered flyback circuit to supply the input to that multiplier. Still, the lesson on cascade multipliers was welcome, and we found the smoke-clearing power of ionized air pretty amazing.

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Look Ma, No Glue! Electrostatic Adhesion As If By Magic

March 9, 2019 by Jenny List 26 Comments

One of the projects at the recent Hacker Hotel hacker camp in the Netherlands appeared to have achieved the impossible. A vertical PCB surface was holding pieces of paper as though they were pinned to it as on a notice board, yet there was no adhesive or fixings in sight. Was Harry Potter among the attendees, ready with a crafty bit of magic at a waggle of a wizard’s wand, or was a clever hack at work?

Of course, it was the latter, as [Jana Marie Hemsing], had created an electrostatic adhesion plate because she was curious about the phenomenon. A PCB with extra insulation has an array of conductors on one side that carry a very high voltage. High enough for electrostatic attraction to secure a piece of paper to the PCB.

The voltage is generated from an AC source by a Cockroft-Walton multiplier on the back of the PCB, and the front is coated with Plasti-Dip for insulation. It seems that soldermask is not a reliable insulator at such high voltages.

Using the board, [Jana] was able to attach a piece of paper to it with a shearing force of 5 mN at 3 kV applied voltage, which may not sound like much but appeared to be just enough to carefully pick the contraption up by the piece of paper. The boards are designed for tessellation, so larger arrays could easily be assembled.

We’ve never had a project quite like this one, but we have brought you an electrostatic ping-pong ball accelerator.

Refurbishing A Classic Electrostatic Speaker PSU

December 22, 2018 by Jenny List 8 Comments

Sometimes a project takes longer than it should to land in the Hackaday in-tray, but when we read about it there’s such gold to be found that it’s worth sharing with you our readers despite its slight lack of freshness. So it is with [Andrew Back]’s refurbishment of his Quad electrostatic speaker system power supply, it may have been published back in August but the glimpse it gives us into these legendary audio components is fascinating.

The inner workings of an electrostatic loudspeaker

An electrostatic speaker is in effect a capacitor with a very large surface area, of which one plate is a flexible membrane suspended between two pieces of acoustically transparent mesh that form the other plates. A very high DC bias voltage in the multiple kilovolts region is applied across the capacitor, and the audio is superimposed upon it at a peak-to-peak voltage of somewhere under a kilovolt through a step-up transformer from the audio amplifier. There are some refinements such as that the audio is fed as a push-pull signal to the opposing mesh plates and that there are bass and treble panels with different thickness membranes, but these speakers are otherwise surprisingly simple devices.

The problem with [Andrew]’s speakers became apparent when he took a high voltage probe to them, one speaker delivered 3 kV from its power supply while the other delivered only 1 kV. Each supply took the form of a mains transformer and a voltage multiplier board, so from there it became a case of replacing the aged diodes and capacitors with modern equivalents before applying an insulating layer for safety.

Electrostatic speakers are no stranger to Hackaday, we’ve taken an in-depth look at them in the past. You may also find some of our colleague [Steven Dufresne]’s writing on the matter to be of interest, on measuring high voltages, and his experience wrangling high voltage.

Better Motion Through Electrostatic Actuators

August 25, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

If you want something to move with electricity, odds are you’ll be using magnets. Deep inside every servo, every motor, and every linear actuator is a magnet and some coils of wire. There is another way of making things move, though: electrostatics. These are usually seen in tiny MEMS devices, and now we have tiny little electrostatic speakers making their way into phones and other miniature devices.

For [Nathann]’s Hackaday Prize entry, he’s building electrostatic actuators on the cheap, and not just tiny ones, either. He’s building ‘human’ scale electrostatic devices.

The reason electrostatic devices are usually very small is simple: the force of any actuator is dependent on the distance between the plates and the voltage. Moving the plates closer together is right out, or else they would be touching, so the solution to building bigger electrostatic actuators is increasing the voltage. [Nathann] is doing this with a cheap boost converter that’s actually sold as a taser module. These modules are small, output about 800kV, and cost around five bucks.

The prototype for this project is basically a 3D printed box with intersecting fins. These fins are covered in aluminum foil, and the box is filled with oil to prevent arcing. Will it work? That remains to be seen, but this project is a great example of what can be done with some creative part sourcing, a 3D printer, and a tiny bit of know-how. It’s some of the best work the Hackaday Prize has to offer, and we’re amazed that [Nathann] put in the work to make this happen.

Electrostatically Accelerated Ping-Pong Ball Travels The Circuit

August 11, 2018 by Jenny List 13 Comments

There is a special breed of hardware hacker whose playground lies in the high voltage arena. Their bench sizzles with the ozone and plasma of Tesla coils, and perhaps it’s best not to approach it without a handy fluorescent light tube to sniff for unseen hazards. There are many amazing things that can come of these experiments, and fortunately for those of us who lack the means or courage to experiment with them there are many YouTube videos to satisfy our curiosity.

One such comes from [Plasma channel], in the form of a table-top ping-pong ball accelerator. It lacks impressive sparks but makes up for it in scientific edification, because it uses static electricity to send a conductive-paint-coated ping-pong ball spinning round the inside of a curved glass bowl. It does this using alternate positive and negatively charged strips of aluminium tape on the inside of the bowl, each of which charges the ball as it rolls over it, then giving it a bit of repulsive force to keep it spinning. His power comes from a couple of small Wimshurst machines, but no doubt other similar generators could be used instead.

The whole is an entertaining if a little hazardous talking point, and a fun weekend build. The parts are easy enough to find that you might even have them to hand. If continued electrostatic diversion floats your boat, you might like to read our recent excursion into the subject.

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The (Robot) Body Electric

September 4, 2017 by Al Williams 13 Comments

If you deal with electronics, you probably think of static electricity as a bad thing. It blows up MOSFETs and ICs and we take a lot of pains to prevent that kind of damage. But a start-up company called Grabit is using static electricity as a way to allow robots to manipulate the real world. In particular, Nike is using these robots to build shoes. You can see a demo video, below.

Traditional robots use human-like hands or claw-like grippers to mimic how humans handle material. But Grabit has multiple patents on electroadhesion. The original focus was wall-climbing robots, but the real pay off has been in manufacturing robots since the electrostatic robots can do things that mechanical hands are a long way from duplicating.

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Vintage Plotter Handles Chaos With Ease

May 11, 2017 by Dan Maloney 23 Comments

No lab in almost any discipline was complete in the 70s and 80s without an X-Y plotter. The height of data acquisition chic, these simple devices were connected to almost anything that produced an analog output worth saving. Digital data acquisition pushed these devices to the curb, but they’re easily found, cheap, and it’s worth a look under the hood to see what made these things tick.

The HP-7044A that [Kerry Wong] scored off eBay is in remarkably good shape four decades after leaving the factory. While the accessory pack that came with it shows its age with dried up pens and disintegrating foam, the plotter betrays itself only by the yellowish cast to its original beige case. Inside, the plotter looks pristine. Completely analog with the only chips being some op-amps in TO-5 cans, everything is in great shape, even the high-voltage power supply used to electrostatically hold the paper to the plotter’s bed. Anyone hoping for at least a re-capping will be disappointed; H-P built things to last back in the day.

[Kerry] puts the plotter through its paces by programming an Arduino to generate a Lorenz attractor, a set of differential equations with chaotic solutions that’s perfect for an X-Y plotter. The video below shows the mesmerizing butterfly taking shape. Given the plotter’s similarity to an oscilloscope, we wonder if some SDR-based Lissajous patterns might be a fun test as well, or how it would handle musical mushrooms.

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