Joulethief SEC exciter and variants

[dR-Green]

The Slayer circuit you linked to over at BrOkenman's place is correct enough and works great. Now, what to do about that hot transistor situ and no output ?
Well, replace the diode that goes from negative supply to the Base of the transistor with a common or garden red LED. The LED connects the wrong way around, same as the diode did. The effect on your circuit is the same, BUT, you get to see how well your coil arrangement is working The brighter the LED, the stronger the wireless field and how well it is all working.

Voltage to a 2222A or MPSA06 or practically anything else can be down to 1V or thereabouts and you'll still get a wireless field. At 3V, no transistor will explode or self combust. A wireless field ought to be at least a few inches and you'll gain much by altering the turns on the large fat few wind primary coil. If you have a fine gauge of about 30 for the secondary, then the primary can be speaker hookup wire (thick gauge 18ish) of just 2 turns. Make sure the primary and secondary are wound in opposite directions.
To test the field, an LED on the end of a 2 diodes splitter (AV plug) is the way, with about 6" of thick gauge wire hanging off the end of the diode join point. But, crucially, the strength of brightness of the LED that sits across the transistor is the major guide toward power being derived. If the LED doesn't light at all, then swap the connections to the primary. Once the LED comes on, yer home and dry.
Increasing the voltage may result in the need for a heatsink. Well, it will for sure when driving above 4.5V normally. Can make one by supergluing the transistor to a large chunk of metal. Or by inserting it into the spaces in a fin type heatsink, or by bending thin aluminium sheet around it.
I have an A966 PNP that's been through some hours of experiments at 12V, that one sits between fins of a heatsink. I used pliers to open out 2 fins and then closed them back up by squeezing with the pliers again. It runs at 12V all the time and is great for the plasma speaker stuff.

Here's that transistor Mega-Test I did

Excellent, I'll have a look at this pdf, thanks The coils I've been using so far with this simple SEC thing are apparently exactly the same ones as Johnny Davro was using. I know he's posted this link but they also look exactly the same as the ones he got out of the disposable cameras.

Trigger Transformers : Trigger Transformers : Maplin

As I say I tried it with the 2N2222, so as far as I can tell I used exactly the same/correct components, and yet it doesn't work. That's what I don't understand And I know there isn't something fundamentally wrong with my basic setup, or me for that matter because it worked with a BC182. So I'm stumped.

I'll try your LED suggestion tonight if I have time. Otherwise hopefully my 40x BC182 delivery will arrive tomorrow and I can try those out.

Does it make a difference whether you use a 1N4001 or 1N4148 etc though? I would have thought not, except I tried running the SSG without a charging battery, supposedly just as an efficient motor, but I kept the 1N4001 instead of using a 1N914, and the neon was stuck on. I assume the neon isn't supposed to be on when it's a motor and not an energizer/battery charger, but the only difference in my circuit was the diode, so is using the right diode that important?

Thanks for the info

[jonnydavro]

@dR Green.Hi and welcome.Getting your first exciter working can be a headache but it gets easier as you learn the characteristics of all the various exciter circuits posted here.
Lets see if we can get you going.
First off i would check your multimeter fuse to eliminate a power supply problem.
Ok so you are trying the simple sec(simple exciter circuit).I would use the small transistors for now and you can test larger ones once you have a working circuit.Mpsa06,bc182,2n2222 in fact most small transistors i have tried work including pnp.
I have ran these small transistors at 240mA on a slayer exciter for quite long periods and a 2 pence piece or other copper coin makes a good heatsink.
Also put an led across the emitter to base like slider mentioned in a previous post.The cathode goes to the base.This led will light as soon as the circuit goes into oscillation and also protects the transitor.
If you are using the maplins trigger transformers,they sell two types.They have a 4kv one and a 6kv.The 4kv looks like a large camera trigger coil and the 6kv is a round one with 3 tripod legs.This is the better one to use and looking at it from the underside,there is a notch by one pin.This goes to transistor collector,the pin opposite goes to battery + and the final pin is hv out and goes to a tray.
The 4kv trigger coil that looks like a camera trigger coil has two thick leads and a fine one.the fine one goes to battery +,the thick lead nearest the thin lead goes to transistor collector and the other thick lead is hv out and goes to a tray.
You may also want to try a camera trigger coil as the output is very good from all that i have tried.
Use av plug detectors to see the field.Make two.One with an led and one with a neon.These are your eyes.
On a side note,if you are going to reclaim components from recycling electronic junk,especially transistors ,i would build a little transistor testing circuit,which just lights an led.You may have a meter with a transistor test socket but it is still best to confirm that the transistor is ok and which pins are which.i have started relaiming transistors and there are some strange ones out there and my motto is,if it won't light a led,don't use it no matter what the meter says
Happy experimenting.Jonny
@Lamare.Great prototype exciter.I have always found your posts and circuits very interesting and i am glad that you have decided to try your ideas out and if you do get your amp draw down a bit and your output is not as expected,try a ferrite rod inside the coil as your coil is 19mm diameter and in the testing i have done, i have had to have a ferrite core in such small diameter coils to get high output,it may be the same for you.
Thanks for sharing.Jonny.
@Slider.Hope fully i will have a pill bottle exciter finished soon.I have been winding it for 2 weeks now,just doing a few turns as i find time.To tell you the truth i don't know how you managed it in one day.You must be a very patient man
Also your thyristor motor is a head scratcher.Maybe you could try the thyristor in an exciter circuit.Great find.Jonny

[Slider2732]

@Jonny - I'm glad you still check in with these exciters, you and Slayer laying out the whole thing has been such an experience for all. And, of course, we're still here building them, so they're no flash in the pan ! Speaking of flashes in pans, your trigger transformer circuit was what got me into it all.
I have all day every day and for a while had a routine of exciter builds, simply to form a working method - start a wind early evening and end just as Coast to Coast is starting on the radio at midnight as a deadline. The rest of the circuit might be soldered up during the show, experiments done and any video shot by 4am when the show goes off. I'd then often be so excited myself about what was going on that i'd be up at 7am again.
The 2p as a heatsink is a cool tip.
I will definitely try out the thyristor on a tower, thanks for the idea

@dR Green, you might have an old Polaroid camera around ? My first pie tin exciter used one. That cameras 6V battery still worked too
For diodes, they're still a learning thing over here and I don't know as much as would like. But I do know that with us working with huge HV and little current, that 1N4148's have been great workhorses. 1N4001's and bigger diodes normally sit in anything that involves current, but anything for rectification or small motor power etc at the HV side is where 1N4148's work very well. Never broken one if that counts.
For a demonstration of real power, you might try 2 of Jonny's 2ltr pop bottle towers. They're much easier to wind than my pill bottles and some great effects can be seen with 2 of them, 1 driving the other wirelessly. Drive the first tower at 12V and have the second one 3 or 4 inches away to one side. Attach a few camera type capacitors (200V 82uF) all in parallel to the second tower and ending with an AV plug. Power up, give it a minute and then short the +/- contacts of the capacitor bank...explosive discharge and never to be tried with pets or children around !!!

[dR-Green]

We're in business! Thanks everyone. I have to go out now to visit my grand father in hospital so I was just posting to say I got it working literally 2 minutes ago. It appears that I have a dodgy breadboard, though that's not the only cause of the problems because I started off using croc leads, so, who knows. It's working with a BC182L off the 8v of AA batteries. Now I'm going to get some more supplies on my travels and I'll be back later. That LED across the base and emitter was very useful Thanks everyone, and I'll be back with another reply shortly.

[dR-Green]

Thanks for jumping in Johnny. I definitely will have to check the meter's fuse because it works on the 10A unfused range, but not 200mA fused. So something looks afoot there! Then again I know how having a meter connected to an SG can affect how it all works, so maybe the meter is working after all. I'll look into it anyway.

I really don't know what got it working in the end, I'm guessing there was a combination of faults and lack of knowledge of this circuit on my part including open connections in the breadboard all happening at the same time, leading to nothing at all working even when trying different components.

Thanks for the info on the trigger transformers. Maplin don't bother to package them or provide any information besides an impossibly low resolution image on the web site so I forgot which transformer was which, and I had to figure out the connections by measuring the resistance from each pin so thanks for clarifying that. It's the 6kV one that I've been using so far.

Good tip on the heatsync, I'll keep that in mind. At the moment I'm using some aluminium foil tape and it appears to be doing the trick so far. Although I don't know how hot it's getting to be able to tell how effective it is or if I even need it at all at the moment.

On a side note, I tried increasing the PSU voltage from 9v to 12v but the supply just died off as if there was a short circuit or it was overloaded (the circuit would have to draw 4A or more, unlikely).

@Slider - Thanks for the info on the diodes. It's always good to know what someone hasn't broken, before finding out the hard way oneself

I'm too new and haven't looked into this enough to know what these towers are all about, but I replaced the 6kV trigger transformer with my small Tesla coil, and it worked nicely, even better than the trigger transformer. Higher frequency and a stronger field. This isn't wound the right way according to these "towers", and I (deliberately) have too many turns on the primary, and, well, it's a Tesla coil so there's a decent gap between the primary and secondary, but it's doing the job anyway. I'll have to get making the mirror image coil sooner than I thought

Thank you both for the info and the help

[Slider2732]

This might cause a chuckle for you then....you might have noticed I solder everything. I actually do have a breadboard, but don't really know how to use it !
Just never given it any time after buying it years ago. With a background of fixing arcade machine boards, just never needed one...and carried on not using one. I'll dig it out and have a look, it would make following a lot of YouTube builds easier..
However, most salvaged components don't have the catwalk supermodel length of legs as packaged new devices, for breadboard placement. The fashion collection on the catwalk for my components would be titled 'Been through a hedge backwards in the rain'

For initial work, does your power supply have to be 12V and only thinking that your supply might be flaky ?
Cellphone chargers work fantastic and nearly everyone has old model phone chargers that are now not used after upgrades during the years. In my case, it was a Nokia 3.7V thing. Neons and CFL's and much of the rest can be experimented with by using one and transistors don't blow at all.
Chop the cord end off and then check the connections with a resistor and LED (as a simple method). Just an idea, in case the power supply does have troubles.

[Slider2732]

With Tesla's birthday of July 10th looking like being missed for my big wireless flight project, thoughts have turned to extending range, current, fields.
In light of which, towers as they are might be positively affected by combining a couple of different wireless methods...I decided on a complete rewind of experiments, back to Jonny's original pie tin circuit. Following the circuit on Page 1 of the thread, I ripped apart a Polaroid camera bought recently at a yard sale and borrowed 2 heatsinks as the trays.
Running at 4.5V, the circuit will light a neon no problem
Wireless range is only a couple of inches, but it's a start on this different foray for increasing surface area of wireless range.

The coil is different and perhaps of note. Following ridiculously cool findings about multi-strand wound Muller machine coils, I wound a toroid with that arrangement. The start wind strands 1, 2, 3 connect to finish strands 4, 5, 6, and 7. Then, start strands 4, 5, 6, and 7 form one coil input and finish strands 1, 2, and 3 form the other coil input. The stranded wire came from the neck of an old PC monitor.

Current readings, through a 1ohm resistor at the Amp meter place indicated on Jonny's diagram are 3ma at 3V (no neon lit), 4mA at 4.5V (neon partially lit), 6mA at 6V (neon lit a lot brighter).

Comically, I normally sit a coffee on the large silver heatsink, to somewhat protect the wooden table...made a coffee when this circuit fired up and had nowhere to put it

Any ideas on surface power ? If you can picture the need for a large area, where a palm sized helicopter will sit. The power is applied and the helicopter starts to spin up. There is need for a large area where wireless power is available, almost like pure induction at this point. Then, to extend the field with other tricks for flying a couple of feet etc.


Pic shows the circuit running.
One of my multi-strand coils is seen mid right, a trigger coil that seemed to be bust and to the right of that the multi-strand toroid. The toroid sings btw, the note changes abruptly at resonance (twiddling the 1K pot) to be much louder.

[dR-Green]

This might cause a chuckle for you then....you might have noticed I solder everything. I actually do have a breadboard, but don't really know how to use it !
Just never given it any time after buying it years ago. With a background of fixing arcade machine boards, just never needed one...and carried on not using one. I'll dig it out and have a look, it would make following a lot of YouTube builds easier..
However, most salvaged components don't have the catwalk supermodel length of legs as packaged new devices, for breadboard placement. The fashion collection on the catwalk for my components would be titled 'Been through a hedge backwards in the rain'

For initial work, does your power supply have to be 12V and only thinking that your supply might be flaky ?
Cellphone chargers work fantastic and nearly everyone has old model phone chargers that are now not used after upgrades during the years. In my case, it was a Nokia 3.7V thing. Neons and CFL's and much of the rest can be experimented with by using one and transistors don't blow at all.
Chop the cord end off and then check the connections with a resistor and LED (as a simple method). Just an idea, in case the power supply does have troubles.

I'm not a fan of breadboards if I'm honest. I only used it this time because I couldn't get anything to work, and it turned out to make things even worse I can see how they can be handy but it's not for me I normally use terminal blocks, the 5A ones are perfectly sized for the pins of the 2N3055 style transistors to fit in, so everything's easy to connect and change things around etc.

I don't have to use 12v, I just want to I wanted to see if the output voltage and frequency changed, how the field was affected, how fluorescent lights brightness is affected etc. I started with 9v so it made sense to go up rather than down Also I'm getting a small spark (plasma?) off the toroid on the top of the coil so I was intrigued and wanted bigger sparks

I think the power supply is working fine though. I basically know nothing at all about electronics but my dad's a recently retired electronics engineer and I showed him the (simple SEC) circuit on paper and he basically said it's a dead short across the transistor, so it looks like the power supply is shorting out and shutting down for "protection". I have to switch off the mains supply and turn it back on to reset it.

[Slider2732]

The Slayer circuit shouldn't be a dead short, or Jonny's. Bit of a puzzler that. Your amp draw, at 12V and using say a well heatsinked MPSA06, should be no greater than something around 120mA if I remember correctly. That would be with loads like a CFL running. Mind you, very often the load doesn't increase at all when LED's or whatever else are added. That's one of the great strange things
Video's by Lidmotor, Jonny or Slayer demonstrate such things very well.

This circuit of mine at the moment isn't even at 10mA, with a lit neon...which may illustrate what i'm talking about. Your supply might, just might be switching off, thinking it doesn't have a load ! I know ATX PC power supplies can do that.
One test for that (and if you could do with some cooling around the workbench anyway) is to fit a PC fan to the output of the supply. You'll have enough draw then for the supply to know it's supposed to be doing work. Stick the transistor in the airflow and it's got another use too

I just replaced the big aluminium heatsink in the pic earlier with a mini tower. The wireless output doubled and the neon comes on at 3V. Next, the 9014 transistor has been replaced with a IRF630 MOSFET and it's all gone nicely yellow in illumination on my workbench from the neon. Also means I can put my coffee's back in the right place

ALSO, my wireless flight forays have taken a HUGE step forward. We just went to to K-Mart, where my wife now works and to sort out her discount card. While there, I saw a Spinmaster Vectron Wave UFO thing marked down from $24.99 to $19.99 and then with a sign saying 50% off. Factor in the 10% discount that we'd just set up and they practically had to pay me to buy it !
So, it'll be gutted of the circuit and lipo battery, a receive coil put around the bottom edge of it and I might just be in with a chance to have good wireless flight by the 10th
Party on !

[jonnydavro]

@Slider.Hi.Aviation is my passion too so your work regarding wireless flight is something i find particulary interesting and i have a funny feeling you may crack it judging by the inginuity of your recent experiments
Here is one of my favorite flight vids that i watch at least twice a week and makes me smile every time
YouTube - ‪Spitfire Low Pass‬‏
Thinking about your wireless flight quest.I would give some thought too a setup like jiffycoil shows in this vid.
YouTube - ‪jiffycoil's Channel‬‏
This seems to be one of the highest output Slayer setups i have seen and what i was thinking was that if you had four seperate transmitting towers in a square,you would have a fairly large rf field.The reciever coil would have to be thought out carefully regarding wavelengh and maybe wound on a former,spray glued and then removed to save weight or some helium gas incorporated into the aircraft to offset coil weight or maybe the output from the jiffycoil slayer exciter is strong enough to use tinfoil sheet recievers suspended below?Jiffys setup will light a tube on the otherside of his labKeep going .Jonny
@dR Green.Great to see you have got some circuits going .
The pan oscillator and slayer circuits are not short circuits.The trigger coil and L2 coil with the slayer circuit form resistive loads and i Would not expect either circuit to draw over 160mA at 12V but what you will find with these circuits is that sometimes it is detrimental to use higher voltages for example you can light leds to full brightness on 3v.Slider gets plasma at 3.75v so it is easy to overdrive an exciter circuit for no visible gain when lighting leds as they will not get any brighter.
Regarding leds.What type are you using?I find 10000mcd blue leds to be very good with these circuits but be careful as they will damage your eyes if you look at them directly.Jonny

[Slider2732]

@Jonny - yes indeed that has to be a fave vid of mine too...who wouldn't shout out expletives like the reporter did LMAO.
The following videos show what i'm aiming at for back garden flying wireless energy style, for now:
UFO type - YouTube - ‪UFO - R/C nano sized‬‏
Based on most famous UFO of all time - YouTube - ‪Roswell UFO R/C‬‏

Big downer on the Vectron Wave...it's unbalanced, tips over and the rotor blades are actually lower than the skirt of the bottom piece
It's rubbish...so it's a good thing i'll be pulling the thing apart, otherwise it would be a return. makes modifying it easier to do I guess. It's 28grams stock weight too, which can certainly see some improvement.

Jiffy's video was amazing. Earth to earth on 4 tuned towers is the way to go

[xee2]

Just tested my coil. So far, no luck. When I switched on the power, it drew much more current than my multi-meter was happy with

I recommend using a cell phone charger for power to start with (saves meters).

YouTube - ‪pill bottle exciter 2‬‏

[Slider2732]

Nice job there xee, looks to work great
Tongue in cheek statement follows - Winding a Walgreen can help with matters at home...with the line to the wife of "Honey i'm only half way through and...." Starting the wind at a calculated time can avoid shopping trips, visits to obnoxious relatives, yard work, cooking and more.

Experiments over here today are to include multi tower running. 4x Slayer circuits and 4 towers arranged in a square, to see if the wireless fields can resonate with each other. Fields never seem to cancel each other if running more than 1 setup near another, but i'm wondering if multiple runners might amplify. Anyone any ideas on that ?

Found an excellent alternative to the PNP 2SA966 that I normally use for small transistor power tests. It's similar, but is the 2SA1020. Standard Slayer circuit, with a jonnydavro pop bottle tower.
Got a xenon flash tube sparkling away at the moment, that lights with its purple glow at 4.5V with a finger on one end. Lights at 6V without. Neons are bright at 3V. Plasma streamers are an inch long at 12V

[xee2]

Plasma streamers are an inch long at 12V

Wow. Amazing results.

[Slider2732]

Yeah, not bad at all. The tower now is quite scratty, performance would increase with a fresh wind i'm sure. The primary is just a 2 turn and probably not optimal from seeing how raised pancakes perform on the smaller towers.
Anyway, here's a quick video for ya of this transistor, that shows what i'm talking about
Sorry about the RF interference by the way, didn't realise it would be as strong when recording.

YouTube - ‪Tesla Tower - 2SA1020 demo - big plasma‬‏