Kirk has given me permission to use his picture in this blog. He builds them on Arborite, which is similar to Formica. It looks a lot nicer than the cheap plastic I’ve used. He says:
Bottom left is a float charger, top left is a cut out relay circuit, the middle is a battery desulfator, top right is Dr.Steven Jones reverse joule thief, middle right is lidmotor’s penny circuit and bottom right is a north pole detector.
He shows several projects that are interesting to me. The North Pole Detector seems like would be fun to make, even though all I really need is a compass. I wonder what the big green thing is? I did a search for it and came up with a circuit that uses a Hall Effect sensor. These can be found in some disk drive pancake motors, if the rotor can be removed to get to the sensor. The rest of the circuit is a quad 324 opamp.
I bought a Power Pulse battery desulfator and put it and a power supply on a sealed lead-acid battery from an alarm system. I ran it for more than a year, probably more like 2 yrs, and I saw no difference in its inability to hold a charge. But the battery was probably more than 5 or 6 years old and ‘used up’. So it may have been too far gone. I’m not convinced that the thing works. It could be another “abs exerciser”. These are not allowed to be used at high power unless you’re licensed and trained, so the ones for home use are too weak to be effective. Same with a circuit that only is running on the battery a small part of the time. If it ran continuously, it would quickly run down the battery.
I looked for Reverse Joule Thief and came up with one of Davro’s circuits. Instead of connecting the LED from emitter to collector, he connects it from base to emitter, cathode to the base. When the voltage on the base goes negative, the LED lights up when it’s
-3V. There is no load on the collector, which allows the voltage to go higher. They say it will run down to less than 1/10 volt, but I’ve built it and I’ve found more like 1/4 or 1/3 volt.
Lidmotor’s Penny Joule Thief. I couldn’t find the exact one on YouTube. Some of his stuff might be posted to OverUnity.com forum, but I seldom log on to this and when I do my userid has expired so I got fed up with renewing every time, and don’t go there anymore.
Just wondering if you need me to resend the picture?