Some of the most common reasons why a JT doesn’t work are: The windings are incorrectly connected. You can usually fix this by disconnecting ONE winding and swapping the two wires. If you have a fresh battery connected to your non-working JT, measure the voltage at the collector of the transistor. It should be the
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Well, Happy Santa’s Day to you, and I hope you got more than an lump of coal in your stocking. 🙂 Measure With a Cheap Meter When you wind the Joule Thief core, there are a few things that you should try to avoid. The most important is to keep the resistance of the coil
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I came across this document on scribd, and found it very interesting. The guy’s name is Fernando Garcia and it is dated May 2009. Unfortunately there is no contact information, for there are several unanswered questions I have that he could answer. He discusses how he measured the efficiency of a Joule Thief and how
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There is a video on Youtube in which the vlogger who calls himself Chilliqueen(some number) calls a two transistor circuit a Super Joule Thief. I don’t agree, a conventional Joule Thief circuit has only a single transistor. Then he claims that the capacitor and inductor is “an RLC resonant circuit”. I again disagree. The capacitor
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The Coil: Explanation The coil, the heart of t he Joule Thief, is somewhat mystical in that those that understand basic DC and AC theory do not understand how a coil works. I will admit that I am no expert on magnetic theory but one does not need to know magnetic theory in order to
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I recently found this article on how to convert a Mini Maglite to use a LED instead of the incandescent light, and the author does it by using a Joule Thief. This has been an inspiration to me, because I have thought about converting several flashlights to LEDs or to a single battery but I
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My Watsonseblog dated 2011 Sep 18 2011 Sep 18 200 Volt Joule Thief This turned out to be easier than I thought, since I was messing around with some serious voltages. It didn’t take long to wind the core, and I used some scraps of wire (you can see the splices I covered with
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Early on in my JT experiments I experimented with a pot (potentiometer) in place of a resistor, which was used as an adjustable resistor and allowed me to optimize that particular JT. After the optimum setting was determined, the pot could be removed and replaced with a regular resistor. It seemed that the pot was
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Or Flashing Joule Thief, or blinking Joule Thief, or 1.5V flasher or 1.5V flashing LED or low voltage LED flasher… I guess there could be a few more names that describe a family of circuits that use a single 1.5V cell, and flashes or blinks a LED. I’ve found a few ways to do this
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Not all of my many Joule Thiefs are powered by electrochemical means. Some are powered by electromechanical devices. This one is powered by the rotating head assembly of a VHS tape recorder. As can be seen, the motor is a series of coils wound around an armature inside of the rotating magnet, which is attached
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