Testing and first light
I was eager to get the coil up and running before school started, so I whipped up a quick test setup.
With the coil test setup hooked up, I was finally able to put some power into the coil. TC_short_sparks.mpeg Here it is running off of a 12V car battery charger. It hasn't been tuned yet and its running on very low power, but it still caused all of the fluorescent lights in the house to flicker.
Here is a scope trace of the voltage across the primary coil. The first notch is somewhat visible. Looks like I need to add a few more caps to the capbank.
The notch occurs when all of the energy in the primary circuit has been transferred to the secondary
After adding 1uF to the cap bank.
Added
a few more caps and it looks pretty good.
Finally, some decent arcs. Using my current powersupply, I maxed out at ~26 inches.
(That white glowing thing above the coil is a flourescent light)
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