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Happy HV Holidays!
To celebrate the season this year, I got together with some friends to make gingerbread houses. My contribution: Gingerbread Wardenclyffe, with real lightning action! (compare to this reference photo)...
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Talk at Ada’s: The Tesla gun
I gave another talk at Ada’s Technical Books: this time about the (nearly completed) Tesla gun. The audio isn’t perfect, and it very tragically ends just before the spectacular spark demonstration, but...
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Quarter Shrinker on Discovery Canada
Pip and I were featured on Discovery Canada’s Daily Planet: Inventors. We showed off the quarter shrinker at Hackerbot Labs. Click the image above to watch the video. The folks from Discovery were...
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The Tesla Gun
The year was 1889. The War of the Currents was well underway. At stake: the future of electrical power distribution on planet Earth. With the financial backing of George Westinghouse, Tesla’s AC...
View ArticleTesla Gun video
Ask, and ye shall receive lightning. For best results, choose 720p. Enjoy!
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Ready for Maker Faire
I’ll be at Seattle Maker Faire today at 3:45 to show off the Tesla Gun. Hope to see you there!
View ArticleElectronics at Work – 1943
They Rectify! Amplify! Generate! Control! And Transform Light to Electricity and Back Again! They’re Winning The War!
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DIY Backyard Genius
The Tesla Gun was chosen to be the opening project of the 2012 Popular Mechanics DIY Backyard Genius awards! PopMech hasn’t updated the website yet, but it’s already out in print (September 2012). In...
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Tesla Gun on Discovery Canada
Santa brought me an early present this year: Discovery Canada (the same folks that covered the quarter shrinker a while back) did a very nice segment on the Tesla Gun. Happy holidays!
View ArticleThe Tesla Gun: a history
Staci Elaan is an electrical engineer who has been making Tesla guns since 2006. Her sixth generation MK6-18V is a battery powered, solid state piece of badass kit: In the course of building my Tesla...
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Tesla gun upgrades
I finally got around to making a couple of much needed upgrades to the Tesla gun. First: a trigger! I had previously been using a switch with a molly guard as the on/off mechanism. Now the switch...
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Go green
The view from my new office. They’re proud of their solar array over there. But I’ll bet that sign is drawing far more than 460 Watts…
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Laser HV repair
I’m in the process of upgrading the brain in the laser from a cheap (and recently deceased) Chinese special to a new design based on the open source Lasersaur. More on that later. I was right in the...
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The Quarter Shrinker returns
Back in 2009, I was one of several folks that built the coin shrinker at Hackerbot Labs. After several hundred firings and sitting in a closet for months, it badly needed some love. We moved it to my...
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Shrinking on battery power
Remember the hockey puck of doom that powers the Tesla Gun? It’s a ZVS driver (also called a Royer oscillator) that drives a flyback transformer using an 18V drill battery. I used to make them as a...
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