If you open up a cheapo 9 LED flashlight you will find that they put 9 LEDs all on the same PC board and they are all connected in parallel. How do they do this without having the LEDs burn out? For decades, the engineers have warned us that you should never connect LEDs in
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I left a comment to one Joule Thief experimenter (video is on Youtube) that one should never power a Joule Thief with no LED connected. If the emitter to base voltage exceeds the breakdown voltage the resulting current will permanently damage the transistor by reducing the current gain. He tried running the Joule Thief with
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I’ve thought about this a number of times in the recent past. There used to be a .ZIP file on the ‘netcalled Xanadu Zapper which consisted of plans and code to implement an IR xmit/recv interface for the PC along with code for learning and sending the IR codes. Many years ago I built the
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I received an email from Paul, with some good questions about the Joule Thief, particularly about the coil. He’s given me permission to use them in this blog. Here is his intro and first question: Imagine 1st an average JT circuit just as frequently made. 1 transistor, 1 white LED, 1 resistor, 1 battery at
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I built this coil, modeled somewhat after the coil I saw in this Youtube video. It uses 24 AWG solid telephone wire, and the winding color indicates the number of the winding according to the resistor color code: 1 (brown) through 0 (black). The first and last windings are 5 turns each. The windings in
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Not me, the beasty I made is the LED abuser. Well, maybe me, too. See the photo. I had this high voltage transformer I got a few years ago, and I hooked up a power transistor (2SC2334) to the center tapped winding just like a Joule Thief. The resistor is 180 ohms wire wound. It
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I was looking through the Yahoo group lost_technology and came across an article from the Wireless World, 1923 about the Russian O. Lossev’s experiments with crystals (the mineral kind like those used in detectors). He got best results with zincite and a carbon or steel whisker. I have a galena crystal, but he got poor
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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 ordered some IRLZ34 MOSFETs from Futurlec and they finally arrived, shipped from Hong Kong. I took one out of the bag and it was marked IRFZ34. What!?!? I ordered IRLZ34, not IRFZ34!! I took the rest out of the bag and I counted 33 of the IRFZ34, and 2 of IRF9Z34, which are not
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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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