Stun Baton

Shocking Idea: Prank Stun Baton

October 19, 2014 by 16 Comments

[Christopher] has put together a Prank Stun Baton to annoy his friends. It delivers a slight shock to the person on the business end of the device. Oddly, it’s powered solely by static electricity, there is no battery here and the resulting injury is no worse than touching a door knob after scooting your socks around on some shag carpet.

The design is super simple and is effectively just a rudimentary capacitor. The main housing is a PVC pipe that acts as a dielectric in the ‘cap’ system. Two separate pieces of tin foil are wrapped around the inside and outside of the PVC pipe. These layers of tin foil provide a conductive path up to the a couple of screws stuck in the end of the baton. A ping-pong ball and some foam act as an insulator between the PVC and the screws.

To charge the baton it only has to be brought close to a source of static electricity, a tube TV will do the trick. Rubbing it with a piece of wool will also work. When this is done an electrostatic field is stored in the PVC between the two pieces of tin foil, one side takes on a positive charge and the other a negative charge creating an electric potential between the two screws at the end of the baton. When something (with a low-enough resistance) shorts the screws, the stored energy on the positive screw tries to go to the negative screw, shocking the unsuspecting victim.

Need something a little more powerful? You may want to check out this other stun baton.

Home Built Stun Baton Turns You Into A Cop From Demolition Man

January 7, 2013 by 50 Comments

It seems much like a cattle prod, but [Pode Coet] definitely had people in mind when he built this stun baton. It’s not for the faint of heart — especially since a wrong move could stop your ticker cold. But the design and fabrication are top-notch, and he didn’t hold back when it comes to build images and details.

The enclosure is a hunk of PCV pipe with a cap on each end. The business end includes two electrodes separated by a 10mm air gap. The spark has no trouble jumping across that gap, and if you get it close enough to the victim it’ll use their body as a path of least resistance. The butt end of the baton features the charging port which takes 5VDC power and a pair of LEDs for feedback. This power port feeds a charger stored within to top off the Lithium cell which itself only puts out about 3.8V. This potential is fed into a boost circuit to ramp up to 16V before feeding a Royer circuit which jumps it up to 900V. That is connected to the final stage which gets it to the target of 10kV!

You can see and hear a demonstration of the baton in the clip after the break. To bad [Caleb] wasn’t around to take the thing for a proper test drive.

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A Singing Arc Lighter

January 2, 2017 by 54 Comments

We’ve all been guilty of buying things we want, but don’t need. And that’s how [PodeCoet] found himself in possession of a couple of double-arc electric lighters, thanks to those far-eastern websites purveying cheap goods. ‘Tis the season of giving after all, justified [PodeCoet]. Being a hacker, the obvious thing to do was to make them belt out tinny tunes. If you’re still holding on to your gas lighters, don’t — because these electric ones are ‘oh so hackable’. Dual-arcs are the same, but twice the fun.

[PodeCoet] starts off with a tear down of the lighter, to figure out the schematic and understand how it works. There’s a charger IC for the LiPo, an unidentifiable micro-controller, a pair of FET’s driving a pair of power transistors, which in turn drive the HF output transformer at around 15.6kHz. He guesses that the “original micro-controller is probably an OTP part like a 12C508” but in the absence of a chipID he couldn’t be sure.

Instead of trying to break his head over it, he just swapped in a pin-compatible PIC12F1840. All that’s left to do is to write some quick-n-dirty code and sprinkle it with funny comments in order to modulate the output signal at audio frequencies. His first choice of tune was “We are Number One” by Lazy Town, the Icelandic educational musical comedy children’s television series (phew). But redditors are awesome, and someone asked him to add the “Imperial March” and [PodeCoet] obliged.

Since he was going to gift these lighters, the sneaky hacker added a prank in the code. Every time the button is pressed for more than two seconds, it works as normally expected and a counter is incremented. On the 20th count, and for one time only, the tune is played. No amount of pressing the button will play the tune again, confounding the user to wonder if he was hallucinating. This also helps ensure the lighter does not self-destruct prematurely, since the output transformer is likely designed for low duty cycles. His blog post contains all of the information needed to do this hack along with handy tips to avoid the problems he faced. A “Happy Birthday” tune would be great when lighting some birthday candles, we think.

[PodeCoet] has a fancy for high voltage stuff – check out “Home built Stun Baton turns you into a cop from Demolition Man“. This man surely loves his pranks, as evidenced by “Hacking your Co-Workers Label Makers“. And the farce is strong in this one — “Student trolls anti-Arduino Prof with parasite MCU“.

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