NikkelNet

Awesome weekend.  Parties in the culdesac two days in a row, accentuated one night by midnight fishing, and the next by midnight wheelin in the wash.  I’m pretty sure I live next to the coolest bunch of neighbors on the planet.  Everyone knows how to party down, and the BBQ, thanks to Jimmy, was “mmmuah!”.

Spent this afternoon/evening working some more on the wireless power stuff.  No pics yet, but they’ll come next time.  Got the primary coil mounted in a fashion thats at least somewhat safe: superglued to an old motorcycle tire!  Built a simple wood stand for the tire, so now its up on my work bench (and yes, this is a 30 inch diameter, 3/8″ cross section diameter inductor built out of multistrand copper grounding wire). 

The driving circuit is coming along too (along with my knowledge of RF electronics and power supply design, knowledge/fear of which has been my real holdup so far).  I have a simple B+ power supply built now, and a bunch of power electronics, tubes, air-core inductors, and air-variable caps of various sizes to play with.  I was going to build the driving circuit with tubes at first, because I was concerned about stability, but I think I can probably get away with solid state.  Solid state is nice b/c its easy to power a large load w/ a single device, whereas a comparable circuit built with tubes would require a BUNCH of tubes in parallel (the characteristics of which have to be matched in order to retain the advantages).  So…I’ve got an order in for some high voltage MOSFETS now.

In the midst of all my googling today, came across a great site written by a guy who built a solid-state Tesla coil, complete with Faraday Cage to prevent himself from getting irradiated.  Startin to think I ought to build one too heh.  Guy did some nice sims to go along with his work too…something to appreciate.  

(Photo linked to from http://users.skynet.be/BillsPage)