At Xmas, I had more than a dozen of the Blue Blinkies under the eaves.\u00a0 Last year a guy at work gave me a bag full of used AA cells, more than 5 pounds, must’ve been well over a hundred.\u00a0 Some measured 1.3V, some measured less than a volt, and some leaked juice and I had to dispose of them.\u00a0 Using magnets, I stuck a dozen of the working AA cells on to JTs that use germanium transistors, so they’ll work at less than a half volt.\u00a0 They just sit there and glow, and when they wear down, usually on the weekends, I take off the really dead AAs and put on some more cells.\u00a0 So far I’ve got about half of them finally used up, as in really dead, and I’ll probably get done in another month or so. I could put them on the Blue Blinkies, but when I built the first Blue Blinky, I put it on a partly used AA cell, and it was dim but still blinking 21 months later.\u00a0 I figure that even if I\u00a0 put a dozen AA cells simultaneously on the Blue Blinkies, it’ll take me more than a dozen years to use up all those AA cells.\u00a0 So let’s get it over with somewhat quicker and just drain them dry with the germanium Joule Thiefs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At Xmas, I had more than a dozen of the Blue Blinkies under the eaves.\u00a0 Last year a guy at work gave me a bag full of used AA cells, more than 5 pounds, must’ve been well over a hundred.\u00a0 Some measured 1.3V, some measured less than a volt, and some leaked juice and I <\/p>\n (Read More…)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-joule-thief-smps-dc-dc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5930"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5980,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5930\/revisions\/5980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rustybolt.info\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}