Making Music

For my Embedded systems final project, I decided I wanted to make my tesla coil play music.

Construction

I was able to get the machince shop at school to cut the hole for the LCD, it would have taken them another 3 days to drill the other holes (due to 3 day weekend). I decided to do it myself. I laid it out 1 to 1 in Solid works and used that to locate the drill holes.

The insides of the box. I used the school's PCB machine to create my own PCBs for this project.

 The finished Box  

Power output Control

 The box has the capability to control the scr's in the powersupply using one of the fiber optic outputs.

As the power knob is rotated, The SCRs are fired sooner, generating more power.

  This worked great in the lab, but not so well when hooked to the tesla coil. In order to fire the SCRs at the right time, the 60 hz signal from the wall needed to be fed into my controller. Once the Tesla Coil started making sparks, it would generate a lot of EMI which would cause the microcontroller inside to reset.

The Music

To get the Tesla Coil to play music, I converted some sheet music into the correct notes and duration. I chose the Super Mario Brothers theme song. Here's a video: SMB.avi