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Registered Member #95
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:57PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 1308
I've given it some thought, but I find programming microcontrollers much easier than designing analog circuits properly. SSTCs can be AM modulated by moving the drive frequency slightly off resonance, like in Steve Conner's PLL. This works great with analog signals, so you can just plug an mp3 player directly into the coil. In my opinion the sound quality isn't great until you have a coil running in the many MHz range though. Direct AM of the power to the SSTC is also a possibilty, and Reaching did it for a 4MHz class E SSTC. The sound quality is crystal clear, but the streamers aren't all too large. If I wanted to directly AM modulate my coil using class A, I'd need a 320V amplifier capable of dissipating 3kW, to get the 1kW output my coil has.
Much off the reason I settled on a MIDI controller is so I could get regular sized streamers AND crystal clear music. Also MIDI players like mine have the benefit of being drop in replacements for an interrupter, which all SSTC and DRSSTCs have, so no changes are needed to be made to the Tesla coil itself. Just plug in the MIDI interrupter instead of the 555 and you've got music!
Registered Member #30
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706
Yes, the gist of it is that DRSSTCs can't be linear AM modulated. The best you can do is trigger a train of bursts at the frequency of the note you want to play.
Registered Member #95
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 04:57PM
Location: Norway
Posts: 1308
Holidays are over and it's back to work! I reassembled the Tesla coil and popped some brand new MUR1560 diodes into the full-bridge this time. So far they appear to have solved the problems I had earlier, and the coil can be interrupted without exploding. I have a habit of turning off the logic supply before the main power, which caused some headaches today. So despite constantly forgetting to power the coil down in the right order, thus loosing at least four full-bridges, I managed to get it functioning again.
At first I tried the MIDI interrupter carefully, in non-inverted mode (like a DRSSTC, so ON-times are short) this resulted in absolutely no output from the coil. I suspect the PLL isn't able to lock quickly enough, so that's one problem which needs fixing. So when that failed I switched the interrupter into inverted mode, so it runs CW until interrupted. And it worked!!! I've made a few videos flaunting my coil already.
The video doesn't do the sound quality justice with all the background noise, in person the sound is quite clear, easily audible without ear muffs on.
Well, there's the evidence needed for this project! I been in contact with another coiler who has been using this interrupter with a DRSSTC, so it works with them too!
Registered Member #1403
Joined: Tue Mar 18 2008, 06:05PM
Location: Denmark, Odense C
Posts: 1968
Bummer :(
The PCB I made was after the schematics you have here in this thread, but then I noticed you have an updated one on your website where there are some changes to the pin layout of the uCs.
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Polyphonic Tesla Coil MIDI Interrupter (and SSTC side project)
