I came across this single coil, two transistor circuit on Youtube and found it interesting because it uses a touch pad. This circuit is the same as many other two transistor V booster circuits, often mistakenly called Joule Thiefs (see the schematic in the video). But with one exception: it uses a 0.2uF capacitor that
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This agrees with my own experimental findings. This is why I’ve been buying the Philips LED lights. They seem to hold up best under long term tests. I think he made a good choice of using the Nichia LEDs, they are good quality and seem to hold up long term, too. Anything else is
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I continued on with my experiments using the BD433 by building a Light Flasher. This flasher is a very old design which originally used germanium transistors. It also predates LEDs, so it used a standard #1850 miniature lamp or incandescent light bulb. Instead I used LEDs, so I had to allow a small current to
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I received a Google Alert with a link to this Instructable. The author uses the two transistor, single winding voltage booster, often incorrectly called a Joule Thief, because he wanted to avoid having to wind the two winding coil. The Joule Thief name was given to the single transistor, single resistor, two winding coil version.
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I was discussing with Aki (theledart.com) his JT blinker, which uses a single winding coil, two transistors for the “JT” V booster, and two transistors in an astable multivibrator to blink the “JT”. He asked me to include the schematic. The first circuit boards that I had made from ExpressPCB.com used an astable multivibrator. I
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A few years ago I saw a video on Youtube for a car wheel light that displayed a message as the wheel rotated. I have seen this same method used on LED lights for bicycle wheels. It was a row of LEDs that were synchronized to the rotation, and as the wheel rotated a
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Long ago I built a light beam communication system. It was sophisticated in that it Frequency Modulated the carrier so that it was relatively immune to interference from light sources. The light emitters were small indicator grade LEDs. Even so, I was able to get it to work at a thousand feet (305M) with the
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I put a timer on one fluorescent light and started thinking about what I had talked about in one of my earlier watsonseblogs. This topic is very important, but is seldom considered, and lack of understanding and consideration causes a lot of waste and money. First I’ll have to discuss the way it used to
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The article in the Oct 2012 Consumer Reports on LED lights mentions the L Prize, so I googled it. I found out that the DoE awardrd the L Prize to Philips. The light looked just like the one I bought but on closer examination I found that the one I bought is 12.5 watts whereas
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My now retired co-worker gave me a present with some bars of Blissed Out Soap, which gives a website on the wrapper. I have been fascinated by homemade soap since I was a child, and watched our next door neighbor make soap out of bacon grease and lye (sodium hydroxide). This soap is very fragrant,
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