Illumination Captured In A Vacuum Jar

December 2, 2014 by Sarah Petkus 51 Comments

Experimentation with the unusual nature of things in the world is awesome… especially when the result is smokey glowing plasma. For this relatively simple project, [Peter Zotov] uses the purchase of his new vacuum pump as an excuse to build a mini vacuum chamber and demonstrate the effect his mosfet-based Gouriet-Clapp capacitive three-point oscillator has on it.

In this case, the illumination is caused due to the high-frequency electromagnetic field produced by the Gouriet-Clapp oscillator. [Peter] outlines a build for one of these, consisting of two different wound coils made from coated wire, some capacitors, a mosfet, potentiometer, and heat sink. When the oscillator is placed next to a gas discharge tube, it causes the space to emit light proportionate to the pressure conditions inside.

For his air tight and nearly air free enclosure, [Peter] uses a small glass jar with a latex glove as the fitting between it and a custom cut acrylic flange. With everything sandwiched snugly together, the vacuum hose inserted through the center of the flange should do its job in removing the air to less than 100 Pa. At this point, when the jar is placed next to the oscillator, it will work its physical magic…

[Peter] has his list of materials and schematics used for this project on his blog if you’re interested in taking a look at them yourself. Admittedly, it’d be helpful to hear a physicist chime in to explain with a bit more clarity how this trick is taking place and whether or not there are any risks involved. In any case, it’s quite the interesting experiment.

Cleaning Slides With Plasma

December 27, 2013 by Eric Evenchick 36 Comments

[Ben Krasnow] hacked together a method of cleaning sides using plasma. His setup uses a mechanical vacuum pump to evacuate a bell jar. This bell jar is wrapped with a copper coil, which is connected to an RF transmitter. By transmitting RF into the coil, plasma is created inside the bell jar.

Plasma cleaning is used extensively in the semiconductor industry. Depending on the gas used, it can have different cleaning effects. For example, an oxygen rich environment is very effective at breaking down organic bonds and removing hydrocarbons. It is used after manual cleaning to ensure that all impurities in the solvents used for cleaning are fully removed. According to [Ben], it’s possible to get a surface atomically clean using this process, and even remove the substrate if the energy levels are too high.

These machines are usually expensive and specialized, but [Ben] managed to cook one up on his bench. After the break, check out a video walk through of [Ben]’s plasma cleaner

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Taking Picture Of Exploding Wire

July 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

wire

[Patrick] didn’t just want his name in lights. He wanted his name in glowing plasma explosions, made by sending thousands of volts through a very thin wire.

This project is an experiment in capturing high speed images of exploding wires. [Patrick] wanted to know if he could shape wires in such a way that they would explode into letters of plasma. Of course, photographic proof of this would be needed, and would make for an awesome logo in any event.

To get pictures of wire turning into plasma, [Patrick] first needed to construct the necessary electronics. A simple spark gap was constructed on a large plastic cutting board – an excellent high voltage insulator. The huge capacitors are charged with a pair of high voltage transformers, and the entire assembly is triggered with an optocoupler and a very beefy SCR.

Even though [Patrick] designed the system for a low propagation delay, there was still the matter of capturing an exploding wire on film. The camera delay varied by about 120μs, but with a really great camera trigger, [Patrick] eventually got some impressive pictures.

After getting the electronics and photography portion of the build down, [Patrick] turned to making letters out of expanding plasma. Simply shaping the wire into a letter shape before vaporizing it had no effect, so he turned to 3D printed channels to contain the plasma. After a few attempts, this actually worked, allowing him to form the letters L, U, and X in an expanding ball of vaporized wire.

LCD-based QR Clock

February 28, 2013 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

Here’s a new take on the QR clock concept that uses an LCD display. The concept comes from the work [ch00f] put into his two versions of a QR clock (both of which used LED arrays). The time of day is encoded using the Quick Response Code standard. This version generates a new code each second which encapsulates date, hour, minute, and second information. If you look at the image on the left you’ll notice the code is not centered. Take a look at the video after the break and you’ll see that’s because it’s bouncing around the LCD like a screensaver. Watch a little longer and you’ll see the psychedelic effects shown in the image on the right.

A PIC32 is driving the display. It’s connected to a DCF77 radio module which feeds the system atomic clock data. The color plasma effects are used to show when the device has locked onto the radio signal.

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Triangle-grid LED Display

May 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

[Dearmash] put together this RGB LED display using triangles for each pixel. It’s an interesting deviation from the traditional grid layout. There are two video demos after the break. The first is a plasma-style pattern generated in Processing. The second is a spinning color wheel which would be perfect if synchronized with your Photoshop color spinner.

So the physical build is done, and now [Dearmash] is looking for a purpose for the device (isn’t that always the way it happens?). He mentions that the triangular layout looks cool, but makes text display almost impossible. Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this work? Right off the bat we could see side-scrolling a font similar to the Metallica logo’s M and A. Bu there must be some way to group these pixels together into readable characters. If you always use an upward and downward pointed triangle on the same row as a pixel it makes a parallelogram which would be used to display italicization characters.

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Burning Plasma Screen With Breathtaking Beauty

March 24, 2012 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

At some point you’ve got to resign yourself to the fact that the TV you’ve been trying to resurrect is just not salvageable. But if you’re knowlegable about working safely with high voltage, you might get quite a show out of it yet. Here [Aussie50] finds beauty in destruction when he fries a large plasma panel from a broken HDTV.

The flyback transformer from a microwave oven drives the display. The video after the break starts off kind of boring at first but before long it takes off. As portions of the display burn out the electric arcs jumping those gaps provide a thrilling view for the remainder of the 14 minutes.

Don’t want to commit to a video that long? Here’s a display that gives up the ghost after just four and a half minutes but we don’t think it’s quite as cool.

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A Real, Laser-based 3D Display

November 20, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 43 Comments

3D display technology is fairly limited. Most 3D displays out there rely on either prisms refracting light from a normal flat-panel display, or shooting lasers into some sort of space-filling device. A few researchers in Japan went with a more unconventional method of making a 3D display that actually lives up to the promises of the displays seen in Star Wars.

From the coverage of this display we’ve found, the green laser demonstration is a scaled-down version that uses water as the display medium. There’s a short clip that shows a red, green, and blue laser projecting a few white voxels into mid-air. The video of both these demonstrations is a bit jumpy, but that’s probably because of the difference in frame rate between the display and camera.

We’re not really sure how the “plasma excitations of air molecules with focused beams” actually work, or even how to control 50,000 of these dots at 15 frames per second. If you’ve got any idea how to build one of these guys, leave a note in the comments.

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