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 delivers electrifying results.
The sparks arcing over a foot of thin air are a dead giveaway, but let’s be clear: this project is not for beginners. High voltage — defined as around 1,000 V and up, with this project hitting 350 times that — carries risks of severe injury or death. Only tackle it if you fully understand the dangers and take precautions like proper insulation and never working alone.
This project showcases a Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier, a clever setup using diodes and capacitors to step up voltage. The capacitors charge and discharge in an alternating pattern, doubling the voltage after each diode pair. [Mircemk] uses 3 mm thick Plexiglas as an insulator, providing both structure and electrical isolation for the diode-capacitor cascade.
To achieve the 330,000 V output, [Mircemk] starts by modifying a standard PC ATX power supply, removing the Schottky diodes from the secondary winding’s output to produce a roughly 15 V square wave. This feeds into another transformer, boosting the voltage before it enters the Cockcroft-Walton multiplier. At first glance, the multiplier’s sides look identical, but their opposite polarities create a massive potential difference across the spark gap.
[Mircemk]’s benchtop exploration into high-voltage territory is a shocking success. If this project lights up your curiosity, dive into our other high-voltage adventures, like DIY Tesla coils or plasma speakers, for more electrifying inspiration.
okay, impressive sparks, what could possibly go wrong here…
Why are there so many people putting videos online with “this video is sponsored by…”. Why are they selling their soul for a free PCB. In this case it’s even worse considering that the video/project has not a single PCB in sight. It makes it all look so cheap for no reason.
How is being sponsored by a wholesome PCB company selling your soul? Just because no PCBs feature in this video doesn’t mean all those who watch it won’t be interested in getting their own PCBs made.
It’s certainly less controversial than some certain sponsors and less annoying than the VPN sponsors that push the idea of anonymity and security by using their VPN – in most cases your ISP isn’t spying on you so by letting VPN provider see your data you’re effectively letting them spy on you should they choose to do so. The VPN doesn’t make any difference, simply means a different entity sees your unencrypted data first. I guess the real uses for VPNs are too taboo for youtube so they can’t be mentioned…
Every advert is paid by the customers of the company, so by watching the ad you’re effectively making other people lose money, and by serving the ad to gain money from it, you’re forcing other people to lose money AND time watching a pointless ad in order to get paid.
Advertisements have long since stopped being about informing consumers about available options, and have instead become about using psychological manipulations to convince people to spend money needlessly. In the end, it doesn’t work, and in reality it’s just about selling advertisement itself -a sham product – to the companies, using the content producers and their viewers as bait.
In other words, it’s just a pointless money grabbing scheme that ultimately produces nothing and serves nobody. Selling yourself into that for a little beer money is stupid in the same sense as shoplifting: it erodes the social and economic foundations of the society and makes things a little worse for trivial personal gain.
‘These people’ are not ‘selling their soul’ if they include sponsorship in their videos. I guess if you dig a little deeper you’ll find they do that because they get money for it. For me, that is an acceptable tradeoff: either this video with sponsorship or no video is an easy choice for me. I hope he does not mind me skipping 1min if I see sponsorship stuff?
I’ll avoid discussing the existence of ‘souls’, or why you think things look cheap in a video you got for free.
How deep should I dig? PCBway has support sponsorship programs that anyone can apply to, you can order what you want (within reason) as long as you mention their name in your video. That’s a bit different than “they get money for it”. It’s not as if this video could not have been made without it, come on, we are not talking about big investments here that require the use of a sponsor. And as you wrote, the viewer just skips it… so what’s the point, knowing that the viewer will most certainly skip too far and miss a piece of the carefully crafted video (in this case not an issue though). The existence of “souls” is not to be taken to literally it was merely to get a point across, in which I have seemed to fail. YouTube already forces viewers into watching adds before the video even starts, there was no need for adding adds deliberately into the video, adds that are hardly of any benefit to the person why put it into the video. Why do I think it makes it look cheap is a good question, sometimes feelings are difficult to explain.
I pay for youtube, it is a family plan, it’s not that bad, plus you can download music and videos to watch without data (many people pay over $100 for cable, or their internet service and cell data). So no YouTube does not “force” you to watch ads.
Do you want to pay for it? I guess that’s up to you. I was tired of watching ads that disgusted me and insulted my intelligence (mostly ads for films I find offensive and would never watch and Nissan’s ‘this car has wheels; is car’ ads 🤦🏼♂️)
I have yet to get a PCB made, but PCBWay seems to have a quality competitive offering. We aren’t talking about trash like micro-transaction ‘free’ video games that are making billions off of the unwary.
Who watches ads? Haven’t seen one (except when part of the video dialog which you can skip ahead) in years. adblockers work great.
I bought a tesla coil awhile back for fun. Loud crackling! My grandkids thought it was cool.
The difficulty is that they are not selling their own souls. They are selling the audience’s souls; and they have no right to do that.
On the list of inoffensive ads PCBWay is fine. They offer good service for reasonable prices.
Many many ads are quite offensive. “Do you want to make a PCB? This service makes PCBs for competitive prices” is hardly onerous. If you don’t want to make a PCB or find a better fit at a different board house nobody is stopping you.
I would argue it’s much less offensive than the annoying and arguably inaccurate VPN ads. Never mind the Factor ads, and leaving aside the obvious pap like Temu, honey, betterhelp, war thunder and raid shadow legends . (Cue relevant XKCD: https://m.xkcd.com/870/ )
But you might still be more interested in choosing a local option than outsourcing your PCBs to China. They exist, but you don’t go looking for one because you’ve being spammed by adverts like this all over the place.
sure a sponsor is annoying but come on promoting a real company that provides useful products/services is in my opinion the only real legit use of a sponsor.
it’s considerably better than scammy sponsors even if I admit it’s getting annoying to see them everywhere
You mean, a Chinese company that uses predatory pricing, government export subsidies, and international postal treaties to suppress prices and your local companies from competing with it?
Sure – that’s genuine value for your money.
No, they are taking advantage of a sytem put in place decades ago in the pursuit of ever increasing profits by money hungry corporations in your own country, who are intent on bleeding you dry in the name of capitalism.
And this is all ultimately enabled by shoppers demanding the lowest pricetag on the shelf.
It all comes down to corporate greed combined with consumerism in the end, the purchasers overwhelmingly shopping by essentially pricetag alone, driving the market to offshore in a race to the bottom.
Predatory pricing under “normal” capitalism wouldn’t work because it’s racing to see who can take a loss the longest.
It only works when you have a government behind you, subsidizing entire industries to operate at a loss for decades until they dominate the global market.
If the olds don’t like hustle culture, they should have built a better world. This youtuber is making money, like they were raised to.
ah… and now we’ve come to the original point again, with an average of about 2000 views per video you cannot say that this YouTube channel is making any serious money. With these numbers YouTube revenue is negligible and the possible free PCB doesn’t really add up either. This channel is just for fun, a hobby, not for profit. I highly doubt that these videos couldn’t be made without mentioning “sponsoring”.
What does “If the olds don’t like hustle culture, they should have built a better world.” exactly mean? Why do you assume I’m “old” and how “old” should I be in order to have “build the world”. And regarding “This youtuber is making money, like they were raised to.” no he isn’t… that’s the whole point! I do not know how he was raised, but I do happen to know that these kind of channels aren’t making any money.
Welcome to the modern internet. Can I get the schematics for your time machine?
Why is there no Circuit Sculpture tag on Hackaday? Many articles have been featured (and even a contest?)
/-— This. Agreed. Add Circuit Sculpture. And maybe Beautiful Build and a How’s That Even Working Build (or Chaos Build).
I concur! We’ll have to get one.
Ok… So now for a comment/post that actually embraces the technical content:
First… cool!
Second, it occurred to me that the multiplier implementation here lends itself well for insertion into a pair of vertical “tanks” fabbed from 4-in PVC pipe/pipe-caps or similar. Said tanks could then be filled with mineral oil, providing both cooling and self-healing insulation for the multiplier stack. One wonders how many stages could be added (just make the tanks taller) before other circuit factors result in diminished returns.
Third, I wonder what the -power- output of this project might be. Is it feasible, for example, to use this basic architecture to develop, say, 3500 V at 0.5 amps for an HF linear amp? Clearly the flyback and PC supply wouldn’t be up to that task, but I’m interested in the academic prospect of eliminating a heavy and expensive plate transformer.
Phrasing that thought another way, why don’t microwave ovens use a switched HV supply? Is the issue technical or one of simple economics, i.e., a transformer is the cheapest design option?
I suspect that by using a transformer you get a free current limiter by virtue its inductance. That would be my guess, but I’m no expert.
The current limiter comes for free because of saturation of the core (or resistance of the windings), not by its inductance. It’s a transformer, not a choke. In practice you’ll just get a very hot core or windings if you short it.
First off, the cascade doesn’t double the voltage on each stage, but each stage adds the feeding voltage to the output.
Main drawback is that the capacitors of the lower stages have to carry the loading current of all following stages, so in a 10 stage cascade for 3500 V at 0.5 A each (except the lowest) capacitor would see 700 V, and the lowest stage would pump 5 A through its capacitor. To keep the voltage drop reasonably low you would probably sell one of these capacitors, buy a 3.5 kV transformer and have a nice day for the rest of the money.
I do not understand. All the sections are in series, so they carry the same current. How can the current in the first stage be 10x bigger then in the last stage? Where does the rest of the current go to?
(I count 16 stages, but that’s a minor detail).
Oopsie. There are two capacitors and two diodes in each stage, so there are 8 stages.
Multipliers typically start with a transformer. This one feeds 15V pulses into a transformer to get a high AC that is then converted to a higher DC voltage.
Given the number of multiplier stages, I suspect this one already has more stages than are really useful.
The impedance of such multipliers goes up with the cube of the number of stages.
This greatly limits the numberbof stages you can use and the power you can get out of the multiplier.
A C-W multiplier is horribly inefficient: Charging capacitors from a real impedance is intrinsically lossy: just as much energy is lost in the charging circuit as is stored in the capacitor.
It’s especially bad when designed improperly, like this one. As Mathias points out, the first of n stages must carry the current for the entire stack, or n times the output current, the second one, is (n-1) times, etc. The capacitors should be sized accordingly (bigger ones at the input side), or the actual output impedance will be very high, and current very low.
A C-W supply for a microwave oven is just (from an engineering perspective) a really dumb idea. 2-4 kV from a transformer is trivial in comparison.
If you want to save a bit of weight, don’t run your transformer at 50 or 60 Hz. Use 50 or 60 kHz, so you get to use a relatively tiny and light ferrite transformer core, like modern inverter-type appliances do.
50 or 60khz would be very lossy. Cap’s ESR would have to be very low (NPO caps would be better) a the junction capacitance of the diodes would have to be low (5 or 6pf or lower) or switching freq would cause diodes to heat up very rapidly…
Of course you’re correct, and anybody capable of properly engineering such a thing would know these things. High speed high voltage diodes are not quite jellybeans, but readily available, and high-Q caps are not hard to come by. NP0 not necessarily needed. I have a 50 kV 2 kW supply that runs at 2 kHz, but only because it’s 40 years old and still uses bipolar drivers.