A Tesla coil with only three components!
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- čas přidán 29. 05. 2023
- A simplified version of the Slayer Exciter solid state Tesla coil using only a 10F supercapacitor, a 2N3904 npn transistor and an 85 turn coil.
It requires an electromagnetic pulse to start resonating at very high frequency.
The larger model uses a 2N2222 transistor. - Věda a technologie
Using the transistor’s leads as the primary coil is genius, love it
The problem is that the primary winding's inductance is so low that the circuit oscillates in the HFs - 10MHz or more. From tests I've made the frequency is very poorly determined and it's more like a spark gap jamming Device. Fortunately it's low power.
The exciter I built used a BD433 transistor and a power supply voltage of 8 volts and about 200 mA current. The arc will burn a tiny pinhole in the skin of my finger. 😮
@@acmefixer1 maybe if there was a ferrite choke that would help with the 'jamming' and move the oscillation into a lower frequency?
Me and my monkey
👍🇬🇧
😱 omg.. I would of "NEVER" thought of that.. awesome 👍😊
You could easily take the crystal igniter component out and rig it to the coil making it all one piece. This was super impressive.
@@young-salt oh I know but so what 😂
I like how you used the caps leads as the primary coil. As well as the transistor leads giving it a hug. Clever!!
The piezo ignition is funny because some years ago a buddy told me to do that, but he said "use a lighter". So I ended up using something like an enclosed phototransistor on the base with only a pinhole for light to travel to it, and using an actual flint ignited lighter to spark enough light in front of the hole to turn the transistor on. Meanwhile I could have just grabbed a grill lighter haha.
Instructions unclear, used fire to start pulse generator.
@@zeekjones1 The days when the 100th Slayer Exciter build started getting boring without some kind of twist, but was still too scared and unskilled to journey into different circuits.
This is like all the electromagnetic theories in one lesson
What a neat device! A speaker voice coil could be perfect as a secondary, will try this for my germicidal UVC lamp that has a failed driver circuit.
Is the voice coil a single layer of windings? AFAIK all Tesla coils use single layers. The voltage gradient along the coil is very steep and I believe there is a risk of insulation breakdown if a second layer of turns is added, effectively laying down high voltage turns directly onto low voltage turns.
@@williamfraserOn a larger scale, you're still using three components with a power transistor and a chunky HV capacitor, and you don't even need insulated wire, you can separate layers with graphene or nashua duct tape (just stretch the rubber to peel it off the metal first lol. Your circuit lights all fluorescent tubes in the room and reverberates for twenty-plus minutes using copper tubing for the primary and scrap HV city wire separated by nashua with the windings spaced as closely as possible without closing the circuit through the air. Portable harmonic oscillator has many applications. Most of them are kind of nefarious, but your circuit is quite the feat. You earned a subscriber with alerts turned on with this one. 😅
A little battery powered clock. They have a great coil in them for this stuff.
I’m just getting into electronics(started this year) but he explained well. the concepts presented clicked with my current understanding and knowledge. Now I have more interesting things to look into.
Good work.
I too am new. Started in around 2018. But my god I wish I was showing basic when I was a kid.. I would have made a carrier out this.. 👍🇮🇪🙏
Not sure why, but this video finally made me understand how this whole thing works.
I love the use of a florescent tube for testing. Also a Tesla invention.
Using the piezo-electric firestarter reminded me that I had a odd "remote controlled" robot dinosaur as a child that used a piezo-electric trigger remote to signal the dinosaur to perform an action. This would have been all the way back in the in the 1980's, but it was one of those clever Japanese toys, and I hadn't thought about it until watching your video.
Interesting investigation of circuit limits!
Thank you for sharing this circuit with us. Love it.
This was super-captivating... Nice work!
I love to run lights from Batteries or my Tesla coil as it pokes one in the eye of the energy cartel. Hahaha.
beautiful simplicity! Bravo!
Bro's voice so deep, he's about to enter the batcave.
Where do you think the video was filmed..
Thanks! I do love simplicity!
Great idea!!! Nicely executed!!
So cool, dude! Thanks!
That was beautiful. Thank you!
That was brilliant. i will make the same very soon . well done
Cool circuit and nice video!
Fantastic project! I have just made one to myself, just had to :) It can be very cool gadget
Fantastic part optimization.
Using oscilloscope probe with ground lead just clamped to tip creates 1 single turn pickup and can be used to watch the oscillations... A cheap 1Gsps scope with 30+ MHz bandwidth is enough.
Very inspiring! Thanks for sharing
I love small circuits like this, I wonder if placing the cap inside the secondary coil would affect its performance, but I'm sure it'll look even more cute
That was my initial intention, making it even more compact. It didn't work for me but there must be a way. A ferrite sleeve around the cap to provide some magnetic shielding perhaps, or simply adding proper insulation around the top of the cap housing.
Unlikely to work. The aluminum can of the capacitor acts like a shorted winding and robs power from the circuit.
lacing the cap inside the coil produces too much parasitic capacitance and reduces the Q of the coil.
That was an awesome and very accessible video, thank hou
Really cool, thanks for video
This is actually pretty incredible I'd be very interested in a load test to see how many lights or how long a light can be on. I'd also be very interested in knowing more ways it could be powered even if they are less effective than the lighter.
touching the lead probably would also trigger it especially if you are inside a building, or if you also touch the + wire. connecting the gound to the earth and then letting a kite with a rope wet in salt watter fly up and either getting close enough to it, or making it touch the middle terminal should also trigger it, if the kite is high enough and if the salt water is of the right concentration then you might not need to ground it.
The spark from the lighter simply induces the first pulse to trigger the transistor (if that is the correct term). The power for the oscillation comes from the supercap which acts as a low capacity rechargeable battery with low ESR. It still needs recharging from an external source.
OK so the Super capacitor is already charged up prior to the Spark Igniter ? This video looks extremely suspect to me.@@williamfraser
@@seditt5146 yes already charged. No free energy bs
Great experiment
Great video.
Nice video shot, thanks for sharing it :)
Awesome made video. You are a professional. Good cutting. Good explanations. Just the informations I need to understand it and no Bla Bla. Perfect. 🙏
ShOcK & AWE simplicity... ELECTRONICS: "The gift that keeps on giving..". Thank you for the video.
Cool stuff!
Try that with the push button piezo from a gas grill.
All it needs is a wire antenna about 1 inch to broadcast the pulse.
Excellent fractional energy driver research.
That is nuts dood!
Greetings from ChCh, New Zealand ..... Very Clever indeed .... Loved the 'Progress' to get to this Super Simple circuit .... I might be mistaken .... Groot Groete 'Japie' :-) :-) :-)
Lekker!
Some amazing stuff going on with this circuit.. 👍🇮🇪🙏
Wow, thats interesting. Thank you
very ingenious!
Love it great video
the trick with the lighter is super clever! how did you think of that?
Trial and error! I have seen several topics on piezo crystals used in gimmick emp devices. Some other methods of induction also worked, all involving sparks, like shorting a large capacitor next to the coil. The lighter was just far more convenient.
The "trick with the lighter" would not be needed if the base bias resistor was not removed. The resistor is so inexpensive that it should not have been removed. 😮 🤨
@@acmefixer1 and how would it still be 3 components?
@@cornishcat11
Transistors are current operated devices; therefore the base should **always** have base bias current, no matter how small. The base bias could be as low as a microamp, through a 10 megohm resistor.
You said it's "only 3 components" but it's *not!* The fourth component is the lighter - without it, the circuit won't start! 😈😳
@@acmefixer1 So you think a 'Start Cart' is a component of a jet fighter?
Nice. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting. It could be useful for emergency lighting and other things
Great creation, very small part count and physical size due to the simplicity and monolithic-esque design. As you say, the fluorescent bulb going out doesn't mean the circuit shut down. The field was just too weak to sustain ionization. Assuming the load characteristics don't change too much, perhaps if the open wire were connected to the filament wire that reaches inside the bulb, the weakened field would radiate a bit more proximately to the gas for ionization, allowing it to stay luminous through lower input voltages. Further, heating the body of the NPN as much as possible (ideally to its maximum operating junction temperature) would decrease the base-emitter turn-on voltage by a few hundred millivolts and further increase forward current gain. A PTC resistor epoxied and insulated with the transistor, or even a source of (non burning) waste heat would do. JFETS would also be a great alternative to BJTs to allow even lower voltages.
I've built a couple joule thieves and one 12V slayer circuit before, but haven't seen the supercap used with them. It's a nice low impedance voltage source for the coil. Though, I wonder what its high frequency impedance looks like compared to ceramics. I would guess the performance suffers without a few low capacitance ceramics in parallel.
Tried underdriving an unmodified slayer with a BD243C BJT, red LED, 1.2kOhm resistor, and 200nF of ceramic capacitance. Got down to 2.08V before the PL-S fluorescent tube extinguished and the circuit failed to relight with a piezo striker. The circuit further oscillates down to 1.4V without ionizing anything.
Preheating at full power to a case temperature of 135ºC and then underdriving did NOT produce the results I expected (lower minimum input voltage operation). The circuit would extinguish at 2.5V and would not relight with emfs below that.
Reducing case temperature to -18ºC, however, did allow me to reduce input voltage further to 2.03V with a base-emitter peak voltage of 1.08V and DC current of 140mA. So while higher temps _should_ offer higher gain and lower base-emitter voltage drop (as much as 200mV), this high power BJT performed better with even lower gain and higher Vbe. Actually, rather than these parameters being relevant, I noticed its transition frequency is 3MHz yet the circuit it was designed for exceeds it at 3.6Mhz. This means gain is affirmatively below unity (1) at my frequency, fractional even. By comparison, the 2N3904 has a transition frequency of 300MHz, so there wouldn't be significant attenuation of gain due to frequency and it may still benefit from some thermally driven tweaks to its properties before needing to change transistor technologies.
The ceramic cap definitely makes a difference, at least when there is a resistor on the base. Another place where I tried two parallel but opposite facing LED's is between the positive terminal of the supercap and the resistor. Both LED's lit up so I assume the primary also creates a reverse pulse, perhaps induced by the secondary, that stores some energy in the ceramic cap before the new cycle starts. Just guessing here, if you have a scope you can test it!
I also had success with a 2N7000 mosfet with nothing but the secondary on the gate. It was an easy substitute on the breadboard because the equivalent pinout is the same order as the 3904. Adding a gate pull-up resistor just resulted in overheating and no pulsing. Adding a pull down resistor worked well, even without a pull-up. The circuit can be started by simply touching the tip of the secondary, no emp required. What worked best was using an led between ground and gate and another between gate an positive (cathode goes to positive). Both light up strongly so the secondary reverse pulse must be pushing the gate well above positive. The LED's should also provide protection for the gate against Vgs limits.
@@williamfraser I'll find some time to do that, but rather than modify my slayer kit which is rather inconvenient to partake, I'll repeat the same breadboard layout you have and wind a new coil so we have similar attributes. Was there any reason for the 80T and diameter? Going for a specific coil inductance, ratio, time constant, or something else?
@@InfinionExperiments I made the 28mm coil years ago, I don't recall why I decided on such a low turn count, it would not have been based on any electronic property, more likely just to explore the limits of what might work. Small coils with high length to diameter ratios all seemed to require ferrite cores to work well while the short wide coils work well without ferrite.
@@williamfraser🤔 could you use this and step up the power and voltage with 2-car generators that diodes being used as the three leads on a AC generator. Run a distribution panel and about 90 amps and 120?
Amazing like to have a go at this someday
Pure wizardry..
Fantastic!
Fellow South African? Pretty clever circuit
the foundation of youth is in the Air.
Use a am radio to see if it's still oscillating ...
"Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With scrap!"
Impressive!
Brilliant!
in place of resistor you can put a small capacitor and at the right value capacitance, when you power on the circuit the cap allows just enough current thru to switch the transistor and get the circuit oscillating.
I gave it a try, used various ceramic caps from 10nF and up to 220uF. It would not start, even when using the emp. When I added a 10k resistor in series it started (using the base-emitter LED as an indicator). A diode or LED in series it also worked (anode to positive). To start a second time the cap first had to be discharged.
My inner nerd needs to try this! time to take apart my old dvd player!
Sounds like you made an electronic pendulum or metronome, which just happens to use a tesla-coil-like design.
Isn't that exactly what a Tesla coil is, a resonating tank circuit between the coil and the parasitic capacitance of the air around it?
@@williamfraser I think he meant like where you give it an initial "charge" and then "release" it and then it oscillates till it "settles down".
brilliant!
Could try the ZTX 653 audio driver transistor. A reason given is it's higher breakdown voltage rating. The forward gain is however lower than the 2N2222A.
If you know ANYTHING about TELAS. You know the Capacitor and inductor has to be in Resonance. C1uF to L1uH makes it like a spring. P.s. there NEEDS to be a ground
The "ground" here is free air
@@ZomB1986 when he touches the 1 wire HE becomes ground. there is no ground. the FREE air as in the atmosphere is a capacitor. That is what lighting happens witch is a short. So your saying you are grounding in the middle of a capacitor?
excellent idea friend, you can improve the circuit, removing the leds that you have at the base of the collector and putting those leds in the emitter and their outputs connect one to the positive and the other to the negative of the capacitor so that the capacitor is charging all the time , and reconnect the line that you removed from the base without any resistance
So nice thanks sir
Try to see if you can broadcast energy from one coil and charge the capacitor on an other coil. Or one coil can start other coil resonanting.
Thank you!
Sir please make a video on basic electronics and its circuits so that we can understand and make our own desired circuis, its my humble request
Smart ass love your work🤓👍
You could have hidden resistor somewhere in there + still used ceramic cap, since supercaps tend to have kind of higher ESL.
Clever!
VERY cool!
Thank.s
Good luck.
Loved it
Great Video!
I can recommend using a transistor such as the ZTX690 for this as it has better properties than the common 3904 or 2222 transistors
Thanks for posting!
I used a BD433 transistor. But most experimenters just use a 2N3055. It works well with the power transistor from an old AT power supply.
@@acmefixer1 basically any transistor with a decent amount of gain will work. The ZTX line of transistors requires very little base drive. In fact, if I remember correctly it oscillates down to about 0.2 or 0.1 Volt... If only my memory worked as well!! 🤔😂
@@gertbenade3082
Germanium transistors can oscillate down to 0.2 or 0.1 volt, but not silicon BJTs - they can't get below 0.5 volt. But the supply voltage is 8 volts or so. So to get enough power the transistor needs to handle several watts of power and thats why I said the BD433 would do it, but so would a 2N3055.
@@gertbenade3082 Wow, Zetex makes some great transistors! The datasheet surprised me just how good its attributes are. You're right, the VBE runs as low as 125mV at 175ºC thanks to its 200ºC max operating temperature, and the hfe can be as large as 1300 bordering a darlington. The main demerit to that one seems to be its toff times are a very sizeable 1300 ns, but the output capacitance is very low at 16pF. Might honestly not be an issue if it's small signal behavior that dominates here in the slayer. I did a bit of browsing and the ZTX series netted a bunch of other options. My favorite for this application would definitely be the ZTX1051A. While it has double the output capacitance, it more than makes up for it with 10A pulse current (from 6) and 300ns turn off times. Moreover, the transition frequency is slightly improved at 155 MHz (higher hfe at 10MHz) and Vce sat is as low as 25mV. With the knee of the IV curve being much further over, it allows 1/4 the Vce and power dissipation at 2A compared to the ZTE690.
I think you found my newest favorite high performance through-hole transistor.
@@acmefixer1 If the BJT is self-heated or externally heated so that its temperature is elevated, then the BJT will have lower than 0.5V Vbe.
For gert's ZTX690, all that needs to be done is raise the junction temperature to 100ºC to break through to 0.4V Vbeon and 175ºC to break through to 0.2V Vbeon. This is only critical once the input voltage drops to 0.4V, so the application already naturally derates the transistor.
The BD series is a really slow BJT class, hot garbage for small-signal operation. I bought a slayer kit that used a BD243C which is similar to Onsemi's BD433. It's more suitable for large-signal DC operation. In both the 433 and 243, the transition frequency is 3MHz. In the case of my slayer, the resonant frequency was 3.7MHz, so the hfe gain ended up being below unity at around 0.6. Had the coil been a lower inductance reaching higher resonances of 7-10MHz, the gain would be 0.
The great thing about the ZTX690 is that you don't need heat sinking at all compared to the BD series, which makes perfect sense then to use a TO-92 package. At the frequencies and input voltages we're using here, it's better than MOSFETs too.
So you built a L/C Oscillator. What is the operating frequency? You didn't specify the coil value in Henrys.
What are some practical applications here? e.g. extremely high speed switch?
This is my first foray into high frequency so right now it is just an intriguing educational gadget.
Awesome 😁 Quick Question...
Would this be "triggered" by a weaponized style EMP?
Also, would this be triggered by a "concerning sized" coronal mass ejection, and if not could it be "tuned" to do so?
I suppose it depends on the flux density at the coil. If the source is too far away it simply would not induce enough current to trigger the transistor. A frequency close to the resonant frequency will probably work better.
Yes it could do that, all it needs is a pulse strong enough to make the transistor turn on.
Wouldn't an EMP weapon simply burn out the transistor?
Well, with EMP close enough, the coil wire will likely burn through. Or induce enough current to fry the transistor.
@@ZomB1986 After thousands of Amps flow through the ex-coil, yes.
Hi brother, your emp circuit is power! 😊
could put a starting cap of 0.1uf or less from v+ to base. would do the same as resistor but in a burst. however, you may need a series diode to prevent it from becoming resonator.
I'll have to try, sounds like it might work.
Got working just as you suggested. A series 10k resistor also worked instead of the diode. The cap had to be discharged first before I can start it a second time.
@William Fraser using the smallest capacitor possible, may help with auto start as it may drain by air resistance.
Kinda reminds me of a joule thief circuit.
amazing
Brilliant hack
Just genius!
The first time I built a slayer exciter and tested it with a flourescent tube, the tube died shortly afterwords (during normal operation). Has anyone else found that?
Thank u mijnheer.
How is it working being connected to the transistor base? Im so confused
I like it, very clever using the leads of the cap for the L1. Though I think technically this would mean that your L1 is actually two roughly one half turn coils. Not that it really matters. I vaguely remember that mosfets are very sensitive to changes in capacitance so if you could find a smalll mosfet to replace your transistor you might be able to turn it on simply by touching a small wire connected to the gate.
Yes the 2N7000 does exactly that, it starts by simply touching the secondary with a finger. I haven't tried it with the smaller coil but it works as a direct replacement for the bjt on the breadboard (the pinout is compatible). Output (neon tube brightness) is less than bjt. It works well with an LED between gate and ground and another between gate an positive to act as clamps on the gate voltage swing. It is self starting with the pair of LEDs.
Do not eliminate the shunt diode across the BE junction of the transistor! Doing so subjects the BE junction to reverse breakdown. The diode should be a high-speed diode.
I love this kind of information. How does one become an apprentice to a scientist? My mind has the creative capacity to throw ideas together, but not the technical know how.
Replicate simple circuits to develop an understanding of how specific components work. Using a breadboard allows you to test "what-if" ideas in rapid succession. Every small change is an opportunity to learn, why it worked or didn't work. Circuits using a 555 timer chip is a fantastic place to start because they often form a crucial part of more complex circuits with real practical applications.
Great video! You have a weather alert radio operator voice 😁
😂
For the dummies here, what is it used for in practice? Does it start and maintain ionization in fluorescent bulbs, or is that just used to illustrate the field and there are other uses?
At this small scale, probably nothing more than an educational circuit or a party-trick gadget. The neon tube is just to show the field and gauge its output power. I have not heard of it being used in fluorescent lighting as such. According to Wikipedia (see "Tesla Coil") modern applications are in arc welding and for leak detection in vacuum vessels (the coil needs enough power to create a coronal discharge, the arcs are drawn to any tiny hole in the vessel, making it possible to visually identify it.)
Tesla coils are a technology developed by Nikola Tesla in his intellectual pursuit of abundance of energy from the natural world such as self-acting engines, transmitters and collectors of atmospheric electricity, as well as functional wireless power for the 19th and 20th century industrialists developing infrastructure for New York and other cities in the Americas. Today we have had the means to popularize some of the patents, essays, and ideas for tesla but not so much the big picture of its functional purpose. Yeah there practical applications for this specific device for education and testing, but there is a deeper problem or challenge to overcome that was left by the man.
Genious!
Did you know that lightning strikes in the neighborhood will light up your fluorescent bulbs that are not plugged in to the ceiling. Just one or two in your hand during a thunderstorm and watch the fun begin‼️
Maybe because of the rapidly changing magnetic field... but idk
Ima go grab some light bulbs there should be some lightning today
So the primary circuit runs at the self-resonant frequency of the secondary? Are you sure? Did you show that?
Olá meu amigo parabéns pelo seu trabalho 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼🙏🙏🙏👏👏 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷 Brasil Brasil
Did you measure the HFE of the transistor? I am interested in what the gain is. Also you state supercapacitor but can you give us the source? I would like to recreate this but with a slight variance and I have an interesting idea.
I don't know the HFE in operation, or how to measure it. The very proximity of test leads seem to alter the circuit's output (neon tube brightness). The supercap is a run of the mill 10F Kamcap I bought from Mantech.co.za.
don't need to measure it, it's well documented in the 2n3904 datasheet. hfe is 35 at 10MHz
It's mega cooool demonstration! )
@williamfraser , did measure output voltage? Can you please measure it, at least approximately?
The frequency and voltages are out of my multimeter's range, I think. I tried making a capacitor-diode-coil "receiver" to measure rectified induced voltage on the loose coil. Max I ever saw was 75V with the two coils almost touching. Turns ratio was 5:8.
@@williamfraser , Thanks for the measurements! It's really interesting, I love such experiments )
Awesome
What about pulling voltage out of the air provided it's enough to light a tube? Start it with a power source, lights the tube and it runs down to a point that the voltage pulled out of the air sustains the illumination indefinitely. Might need a really large antenna to get enough power for sustainment. The power would be from either static or other EMF sources such as power wires or transmitters.
That would be a neat achievement.
@@williamfraser i thought thats what a tesla coil was
Tesla pulled electricity out the sky, every 1 metre you go up from the ground the voltage goes up 100 volts, you would only need to go 2.4metres to get 240 volts.
Made a voltaic pile using 16 logs, a carbon steel screw in one end each log, a piece of copper wire in the centre of each log, and a piece of copper wire connecting the screw of one log to the copper wire of the next until all logs were connected in series. Managed to get 12.34 volts out the end and it powered an LED continuously- forever if the logs never dried out (if i used a growing tree rather than a chopped up one)
how many components do you need to rebuild this as a radio? maybe a dumb question but its still interesting to me. you guys are magicians!
This question is far from dumb. This oscillator circuit can and has been tuned and used as a dedicated RF transmitter (aka "bug")
I noticed that the frequency can be adjusted by moving the position of the primary so if possible it should at least be tunable.