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Registered Member #1704
Joined: Fri Sept 19 2008, 08:54AM
Location: Box Hill North, VIC, Melbourne, AUS
Posts: 9
Hello all,
I am beginning to build Steve Ward's Micro Tesla Coil It is my first SSTC. I have finished the electronics, but i am waiting on the TC4420 to arrive in the mail. I was wondering if anyone could help me with my design before the big power up....like is the arial too long? I have powered it off 20V with no chips(to test if it was wired correctly), and the 12V regulator became quite hot quite quickly. Was this because there was no load on the rest or the power supply? or because of other reasons... I will run it off 35VDC @ 50VA(~1.5A) In this picture you can see my MOSFET (at the left of the circuitry) which has a large heatsink and fan. You can see the voltage regulator (at the front) mounted on a heatsink.
Registered Member #1535
Joined: Wed Jun 11 2008, 11:37PM
Location: Northeastern Pennsylvania - USA
Posts: 117
I beleive that 35vdc is the upper limit for a 7812. I would prefer to run it around 20vdc. It's dissipating a lot of heat at 35vdc. That's my 2 cents unless I'm missing something...
Registered Member #1704
Joined: Fri Sept 19 2008, 08:54AM
Location: Box Hill North, VIC, Melbourne, AUS
Posts: 9
Yeah i just found a bridge on the output of the 12v regulator. I did another 20VDC test run today, and it is not getting warm at all. It is running my fan, so it does have load. Thanks for the help
Registered Member #1658
Joined: Thu Aug 28 2008, 11:27AM
Location: Yungaburra Qld Australia
Posts: 8
Hey guys I am new to sstc's and I have been looking at some schematics and I have all ways wanted to build one with this circuit but can’t find the accurate parts, Is this a good circuit to make as a beginner and can it power different coil dimensions? I am on holidays now and trying to make a sstc very soon.. so any reply is mostly appreciated
Registered Member #1704
Joined: Fri Sept 19 2008, 08:54AM
Location: Box Hill North, VIC, Melbourne, AUS
Posts: 9
Yes this coil is very simple compared to full wave versions which are a maze of electronics. I chose to start with this because it is fairly simple to build. It may be limited on the power side of things though. I suppose if you got a better MOSFET and ran the it and the coil off rectified mains, i dont see why it wouldnt work. But i do recommend that you get more experience with low voltage tesla coils before using mains. Or maybe you could use a half or full bridge of MOSFETS to get more power. There are many designs out there.
Registered Member #1790
Joined: Fri Oct 31 2008, 10:10AM
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 40
Hi,
I am not sure of how experienced you guys are with electronics but a tesla coil is quite complicated.
Maybe you shoould mess around with a flyback driver first so you get to know high voltage a little better.
After that you could try a fixed freq.. sstc and then move onto something like this.
Try building a zvs driver and instead of running a flyback with it make 3+3 primary on your secondary, use those 160v 7amp fets from jaycar you should be able to run it up to 40 volts and get very nice breakout. and all the other components are availble from jaycar.
Registered Member #1225
Joined: Sat Jan 12 2008, 01:24AM
Location: Beaumont, Texas, USA
Posts: 2253
TravisD wrote ...
Hey guys I am new to sstc's and I have been looking at some schematics and I have all ways wanted to build one with this circuit but can’t find the accurate parts, Is this a good circuit to make as a beginner and can it power different coil dimensions? I am on holidays now and trying to make a sstc very soon.. so any reply is mostly appreciated
Registered Member #540
Joined: Mon Feb 19 2007, 07:49PM
Location: MIT
Posts: 969
I don't think that a fixed freq coil would work all the well because the resonant freq would changed when something that is capacitively coupled to ground moves near the secondary.
With a SSTC there shouldn't be any high voltage on the primary side of the coil. All the high voltage would be on the output.
Here are a couple suggestions I would make. I would try to tie everything down so that it doesn't have any chance of moving and shorting something out. You probably want to use a different circuit if you were to move to higher powers.
Registered Member #1790
Joined: Fri Oct 31 2008, 10:10AM
Location: Sydney, Australia
Posts: 40
wrote ...
I don't think that a fixed freq coil would work all the well because the resonant freq would changed when something that is capacitively coupled to ground moves near the secondary.
Yes Myke but the whole point is that it is very simple and its a good learning experience, for example:
He goes ahead and builds a simple 555 oscilator and tunes it to the right frequency , and of course gets breakout
He than tries to pull an arc but it stops working he of course starts to wonder why this is so, he than goes on the net and researches this and and find some info but than he does not understand some of the things the paper talks about so he goes to find out the thing he didnt know, he does this on an on and he absorbs a large amount of info in the process
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Steve's Micro SSTC building tips
