This is my replication of Xee2vids’ Human Powered Joule Thief (Flasher), in a Youtube video. The changes I made are as follows. I used a BC550C which is the same as the BC547C very common NPN transistor. I thought that since the flash rate looked too fast on the Youtube video, and since a slower
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This experimenter’s circuit uses ten BF245 JFETs in parallel to get the 30 to 40 millivolts up to LED voltage. Here’s the Youtube video. IT looks like I will have to reduce my primary winding from two turns to one turn.
I finished gluing the 10 000 uF capacitors down to a piece of wood. I now have a Massively Parallel Capacitor Array (MPCA) Now the hard part comes: connecting all 150 of them up in parallel. I bought a whole box of 250 electrolytic capacitors on tape and fan folded. They were only ten dollars
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I bought a few bricks of 40 AAA cells at Fry’s, mainly because they were only $4.20 each, or about ten cents apiece – that’s cheap! But I really needed AAA cells because of all the Fenix LD01 and similar flashlights I now have. But I have so many AAA cells that I’ll never be
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I received a Google Alert for a Youtube video from Mongrel Shark showing Joule Thiefs with his version of Tesla’s Pancake coils. He refers to and gives the number of the patent Tesla had on this pancake coil (I haven’t read it yet). He used two coils, each with its own Joule Thief. For some
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This motor and gear drive is from a mainframe computer, probably the tape drive. The gear ratio is high, probably a dozen or more motor revs for one shaft revolution. But that just makes cranking it turn the motor faster. The motor says it’s 30VDC, and it uses magnets. When I turn the makeshift crank
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Years ago I became acquainted with one of our librarians, who was from Germany. He told me he lived in Dresden during World War 2, and he had a flashlight that had a handle which he could squeeze and it would light the bulb. But he said he lost it and everything else when the
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This is for all those free Energy fanatics who claim they can light over a hundred LED xmas lights to ‘full brightness’ on a single AA cell. I put four white LEDs on a small PC board in series, and connected them to a 9VDC wall wart AC adapter, which put out about 15 volts
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I have this billet of magnesium that I’ve used for a number of things including a door stop. It’s rather light for its size, and the metal is soft, like aluminum. But the chips from drilling burn with a white light. It really is magnesium. I drilled a small hole in it to screw a
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I once had this blogged in my watsonseblog, but I haven’t blogged it here. I’m trying to charge this Maxwell ‘Boost Cap’ or ultracapacitor with a solar cell, but the problem is that this cap is so ginormous that it takes a very long time to charge when the solar cell is putting out 100
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