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With Halloween just around the corner, I thought it would be a good time to celebrate a little with my recently completed SSTC 2 - a weekend Tesla Coil (actually it took more like 2 weekends to build). Introducing SSTC 2 - Halloween Edition! This is also my second SSTC.
See my website for more information:
This is actually a squash, not a pumpkin! I wanted to find a flat torus-looking pumpkin but I couldn't seem to find them in my supermarket.
Coil Specifications: - SSTC in half-bridge configuration, 30N60 IGBTs - 6.5 x 3.5" secondary - 120VAC input - 250kHz resonant frequency - 30 - 1000us pulse width, 1 to 500Hz - Fits inside an old ATX power supply box! - Max sparks just about 8"
Turns out the pumpkin was quite conductive. I simply stuck a small wire at the base of the pumpkin to the top of the secondary coil, and another small wire piece at the top as the breakout point.
I want to thank the following people for their inspiration in building this coil: - Steve's weekend SSTC 5 coil - Zrg's half-bridge SSTC - Bayley's very small 900kHz SSTC
The coil runs on secondary base current feedback, which I found works pretty good if shielded well. Also, I use a single ATtiny microcontroller as the interrupter, which saved me some space making a 555 interrupter on my perf-board.
Thats REALLY beautiful! My son picked up some of those same gourds. And the photography is really nice - good sharp arc images!
Did you stick a conductive wire through the pumpkin, or is that just conducting through the stem?
Thanks for the comments :). The goal of the project was just to see what I could cook up in a weekend so it wasn't optimized for spark length. I'm glad how it turned out though. Here's a photo of the coil with the real toroid. It make around 8" sparks at the moment.
As for the conductive wire, there's only about half an inch of wire through the pumpkin stem and another short wire at the bottom to the secondary coil. The fruit is conducting the rest and it seems to do so pretty well :)
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Halloween Tesla Coil!
