I told Paul about my Supercharged Joule Thief but he had doubts about it having lower current consumption than a conventional Joule Thief. Originally I had set the value of the resistor to give the optimum current through the LED, and it was about 1.5k, which was good for about 20 mA LED current. But
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I built this 1.5V to 9V DC-DC converter. It’s a modified Tim Williams design. It’s a Joule Thief with the output rectified and filtered, which is compared to the “Vref” zener diode and if the output voltage is too high, it turns off the base bias current to the Q2 driver transistor. The input is
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I had to spin the shaft really fast to get the LED to light up, and now that I converted the generator (was a CD-ROM drive motor) by adding the Joule Thief to the back, all I have to do is spin the shaft gently and the LED lights up brightly. It’s a big difference;
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There are many other uses for common household items, or even stuff that would otherwise go to the trash or recycling. In this case, I built a two transistor “Joule Thief” V Booster on a small perf board, put it inside of a soda bottle cap along with two screws and encapsulated it in epoxy
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The following is from my late Watsonseblog dated 2010 Dec 26 (no pics or links yet). I made this a few years ago when I tried to see how well these two transistor JT type circuits work, and how efficient they are. The coil is a 180 microhenry RF choke with a single winding, and
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I named this “Blinky Booster” dual switched capacitor voltage boost flasher after my Blue Blinky, which used a coil. This dual switched capacitor voltage boost flasher uses no coil or inductor. Last week I got Bowden’s flasher, a single switched capacitor voltage boost flasher, working properly, but it was not capable of flashing blue or
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I drew this schematic almost ten years ago, and of course the actual charger is nowhere to be found. I think it may have burned out somehow, and that was why I drew the schematic. Whatever the case, it does have current limiting, which has to be in anything like this that might be used
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I received the bag of these tiny inverter transformers that I ordered from goldmine-elec.com. Each was tiny: 10.7mm wide, 10mm deep, and 9mm high, not counting the leads. There are two windings, the primary which is 0.11 ohms and an unknown inductance, and the secondary which is 48.4 ohms and 350 mH. They sent a
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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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I need more germanium JTs to run down the AA cells to less than a tenth of a volt, so I put this one together using an antique germanium 2N652 made by ETCO. I used a blue-green or aqua LED like the ones used in the traffic lights. It uses a Fair-Rite 2643002402 core. The
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