It’s been awhile since I blogged this, so I may be saying what I’ve already said before. But I get comments from others about how to make measurements of the LED brightness. A recent one is in the comments of an older blog. Many Joule Thief builders don’t have the minimum tools needed for some
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In the wiki for Joule Thief on Wikipedia, someone claimed that the Joule Thief is an Armstrong Oscillator. I dispute that claim and prove it’s wrong in the following discussion. An oscillator is capacitance and inductance ( j.omega )that forms a resonant circuit, and according to Barkhausen criterion, an amplifier that is a linear circuit
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As the month of February fades away into March, a Google Alert (see note) brought me an actual Joule Thief, sort of. It looks to me more like a switch mode power supply, with its opto coupler. That, to me, seemed puzzling since the primary and secondary share the same common ground. I haven’t done
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I was looking at the references in the Joule Thief Wiki at Wikipedia, especially the first reference, [1] after “Armstrong” in the first line of the text. This refers to an article which describes this as an Armstrong or Meissner oscillator. This article then points back to Wikipedia as a reference. What we have is
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I was out walking and saw three AAA cells in the street. All three had been run over by cars, possibly several times; most likely someone discarded them when their camera or whatever had said the batteries were too low. I picked them up and brought them home, and put them to good use at
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Here is a guy’s photo collection of his Joule Thief artistic designs on Flickr. He’s come up with some innovative results using various items of plastic, wire and glue to give some cool looking JT lights. I think this T. Rex might also be used for a note holder or perhaps a third hand for
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Paul has been busy creating little Joule Thief Jewels out of salvaged household items such as CFL ‘corkscrew’ light bulbs. He has given me permission to post one here. This is also a cork supported one. I used a reclaimed toroid with 15 turns of new enamelled wire for right winding and a reclaimed double
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