Flat Transformer Gives This PCB Tesla Coil Some Kick

June 9, 2021 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

Arguably, the most tedious part of any Tesla coil build is winding the transformer. Getting that fine wire wound onto a suitable form, making everything neat, and making sure it’s electrically and mechanically sound can be tricky, and it’s a make-or-break proposition, both in terms of the function and the aesthetics of the final product. So this high-output printed circuit Tesla should take away some of that tedium and uncertainty.

Now, PCB coils are nothing new — we’ve seen plenty of examples used for everything from motors to speakers. We’ve even seen a few PCB Tesla coils, but as [Ray Ring] points out, these have mostly been lower-output coils that fail to bring the heat, as it were. His printed coil generates some pretty serious streamers — a foot long (30 cm) in some cases. The secondary of the coil has 6-mil traces spaced 6 mils apart, for a total of 240 turns. The primary is a single 240-mil trace on the other side of the board, and the whole thing is potted in a clear, two-part epoxy resin to prevent arcing. Driven by the non-resonant half-bridge driver living on the PCB below it, the coil can really pack a punch. A complete schematic and build info can be found in the link above, while the video below shows off just what it can do.

Honestly, for the amount of work the PCB coil saves, we’re tempted to give this a try. It might not have the classic good looks of a hand-wound coil, but it certainly gets the job done. Continue reading “Flat Transformer Gives This PCB Tesla Coil Some Kick” →

Keep Coffee Warm Through Induction Heating

April 11, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

Transformers have an obvious use for increasing or decreasing the voltage in AC systems, but they have many other esoteric uses as well. Electric motors and generators are functionally similar and can be modeled as if they are transformers, but the truly interesting applications are outside these industrial settings. Wireless charging is essentially an air-core transformer that allows power to flow through otherwise empty space, and induction cooking uses a similar principle to induce current flow in pots and pans. And, in this case, coffee mugs.

[Sajjad]’s project is an effort to keep his coffee warm while it sits on his desk. To build this special transformer he places his mug inside a coil of thick wire which is connected to a square wave generator. A capacitor sits in parallel with the coil of wire which allows the device to achieve resonance at a specific tuned frequency. Once at that frequency, the coil of wire efficiently generates eddy currents in the metal part of the coffee mug and heats the coffee with a minimum of input energy.

While this project doesn’t work for ceramic mugs, [Sajjad] does demonstrate it with a metal spoon in the mug. While it doesn’t heat up to levels high enough to melt solder, it works to keep coffee warm in a pinch if a metal mug isn’t available. He also plans to upgrade it so it takes up slightly less space on his desk. For now, though, it can easily keep his mug of coffee hot while it sits on his test bench.

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Homebrew Coil Winder Makes Toroids A Snap To Wind

June 5, 2020 by Dan Maloney 13 Comments

Anyone who has ever wound a toroidal coil by hand can tell you that it’s not exactly a fun job. Even with the kinds of coils used in chokes and transformers for ham radio, which generally have relatively few windings, passing all that wire through the toroid time after time is a pain. And woe unto anyone who guesses wrong on how much wire the job will take.

To solve those problems, [Sandeep] came up with this clever and effective toroid winder. The idea is to pass a small spool of magnet wire through the toroid’s core while simultaneously rotating the toroid to spread the windings out as evenly as possible. That obviously requires a winding ring that can be opened up to allow the toroid form to be inserted; [Sandeep] chose to make his winding ring out of plywood with a slit in it. Carrying the wire spool, the winding ring rotates on a C-shaped fixture that brackets the toroid, which itself rotates under stepper motor control on a trio of rollers. An Arduino controls the rotation of both motors, controlling the number of windings and their spread on the form. lacking a ferrite core for testing, [Sandeep] used a plywood ring as a stand-in, but the results are satisfying enough to make any manual coil-winder envious.

We love tools like this that make a boring job a snap. Whether it’s cutting wires for wiring harnesses or winding guitar pickups, tools like these are well worth the time spent to build them. But we suppose when it comes to toroid winding, one could always cheat.

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The Easiest Way To Put Your Doorbell On The Internet

June 1, 2020 by Tom Nardi 39 Comments

Thanks to low-cost WiFi enabled microcontrollers such as the ESP8266 and ESP32, it’s never been a better time to roll your own smart home system. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t daunting for new players. If you’re looking for an easy first project, putting your old school doorbell on the Internet of Things is a great start, but even here there’s some debate about how to proceed.

Most people stumble when they get to the point where they have to connect their low-voltage microcontroller up to the relatively beefy transformer that drives a standard doorbell. We’ve seen a number of clever methods to make this connection safely, but this tip from [AnotherMaker] is probably the easiest and safest way you’re likely to come across.

His solution only requires an inductive current sensor, which can be had for less than $1 from the usual overseas suppliers. One leg of the doorbell circuit is passed through the center of this sensor, and the sensor itself is connected up to your microcontroller of choice (here, and ESP32). The rest is software, which [AnotherMaker] explains in the video after the break. With the addition of a little debounce code, your microcontroller can reliably determine when somebody is out there jabbing the bell button; what you do with this information after that is up to you.

If you’re worried this method is too easy you could always try it with an optocoupler, or maybe convert the low-voltage AC to something your microcontroller can handle.

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Shoot The Moon With This Homebrew Hardline RF Divider

March 31, 2020 by Dan Maloney 21 Comments

You can say one thing for [Derek]’s amateur radio ambitions — he certainly jumps in with both feet. While most hams never even attempt to “shoot the Moon”, he’s building out an Earth-Moon-Earth, or EME, setup which requires this little beauty: a homebrew quarter-wave hardline RF divider, and he’s sharing the build with us.

For background, EME is a propagation technique using our natural satellite as a passive communications satellite. Powerful, directional signals can bounce off the Moon and back down to Earth, potentially putting your signal in range of anyone who has a view of the Moon at that moment. The loss over the approximately 770,000-km path length is substantial, enough so that receiving stations generally use arrays of high-gain Yagi antennas.

That’s where [Derek]’s hardline build comes in. The divider acts as an impedance transformer and matches two 50-ohm antennas in parallel with the 50-ohm load expected by the transceiver. He built his from extruded aluminum tubing as the outer shield, with a center conductor of brass tubing and air dielectric. He walks through all the calculations; stock size tubing was good enough to get into the ballpark for the correct impedance over a quarter-wavelength section of hardline at the desired 432-MHz, which is in the middle of the 70-cm amateur band. Sadly, though, a scan of the finished product with a NanoVNA revealed that the divider is resonant much further up the band, for reasons unknown.

[Derek] is still diagnosing, and we’ll be keen to see what he comes up with, but for now, at least we’ve learned a bit about homebrew hardlines and EME. Want a bit more information on Moon bounce? We’ve got you covered.

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A DIY Stun Gun You Probably Shouldn’t Build

March 16, 2020 by Tom Nardi 36 Comments

In these troubled times, when a trip to the grocery store could turn into a brawl over toilet paper, you might be inclined to build yourself a low-cost electroshock weapon. Or at least, that’s what [Alex Zidros] did. We don’t necessarily recommend you follow in his footsteps, and we’re certainly not advocating testing it on a loved one. We just bring you this information, you have to decide what you do with it.

So what does it take to build an improvised stun gun? Not a whole lot, it turns out. As you might have guessed, the star of the show is a high voltage transformer which supposedly puts out 400 kV. Just looking at it (and the price) we’re going to go out on a limb and say the performance specs are way overrated, but in this case that might actually be a good thing.

Beyond the transformer, there’s a simple 9 V battery holder and electrodes made from the prongs of a hacked up travel adapter. To deliver the lightning, [Alex] is using a pink arcade button. Just because you might be fighting for your life doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun, right? Everything is packed into a simple 3D printed enclosure, but you could easily replace that with any suitably sized box. Something made out of wood might be a good idea, considering.

If you’d like to see another person shocked by a cobbled together high-voltage weapon, and potentially even learn something in the process, check out the “tutorial” video [Mehdi Sadaghdar] did back in 2014. We did mention you definitely shouldn’t do this at home, right?

DIY Electrolysis Tank: Removing Rust While You Sleep

November 10, 2019 by Danie Conradie 41 Comments

Anyone who’s done a bit of metalworking will know how quickly your stockpile will pick up a coating of rust with even just a bit of humidity. While welding requires only a bit of wire brushing at the joint areas, cleaning a large frame for paint is a completely different story. The projects [Make it Extreme] gets himself into tend to involve a lot of steel, so he built his own electrolysis tank for rust removal.

Electrolytic rust removal involves placing the piece of steel to be cleaned into an alkaline electrolyte solution (water and washing soda) with a sacrificial steel anode and connecting a low voltage DC supply over the two pieces. [Make it Extreme] started with an old plastic container, around which he built a very neat trolley frame. He obviously put some thought into how the tank will be cleaned, since it can be removed by unscrewing six bolts and removing the top part of the frame.

The high current, low voltage power supply that is required for the process was built using an old microwave transformer. The secondary coil is removed and replaced with coil of thick insulated wire, to convert it into a step down transformer. After the rewinding the transformer outputs about 13 VAC, which is then run through beefy bridge rectifier modules to get a DC current. A custom machined copper bolt terminal is mounted through the side of the tank to attach the sacrificial anode plate to the positive lead of the power supply, while the negative lead is clamped to the rusty steel to be cleaned.

[Make it Extreme]’s projects never get old, with everything from rideable tank tracks to rotary electric guns. Check out the video after the break to see the build and an impressive demo. Continue reading “DIY Electrolysis Tank: Removing Rust While You Sleep” →