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Author Topic: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?  (Read 412382 times)

d3x0r

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #270 on: June 30, 2014, 05:16:02 AM »
Picture 1 : high voltage (24V+) looper circuit.... 12mH power-collector, 7mH across LEDs
The collector gets a high flyback pulses, with an additonal rise at the end when the gate is off...


Picture 2 : 7mH power-collector, 12mH across LEDs...
top picture - lower voltage; 7.4V, shows the progressive ring-up after a burst of oscillations
middle picture - high voltage - probably up to 30V with a high flyback on the collector winding
bottom picture - zoomed in, centered better so 0 of yellow trace is at -V, so the 0 line should be equal to V...which shows it gets a voltage above the input.  Being clever, an attempt to put a diode from the collector back to positive actually increases current draw 20-30mA.  Not shown, while paused at the end, i accidentally shorted power to ground and popped the transistor and 2 diodes.


the first picture shows a similar signal to the akula flashlight (v4?) that he was demonstrating on a ferrite core.  Other than being like a 0 duty cycle between pulses... *shrug* Turns out it's basically a useless power, if I just touch a diode to the positive with a finger, that high part goes away.... (further expiriment after fixing it, not shown).


Only thing I do think is good is a diode to catch the low pulse on the gate and dump it to ground... at least keeps the gate from under-voltaging which doesn't seem to affect it... but does reduce power draw and increases brightness.


These white LEDs show much brighter on camera than they do in person... so many times I say 'barely on' and they really are very dim... less than 25% brightness probably, but the camera shows them quite bright.


Don't waste your time watching...
P1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPhmjvt8WhI
P2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_71bdAI9_E




conradelektro

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #271 on: June 30, 2014, 01:58:24 PM »
P1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPhmjvt8WhI
P2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_71bdAI9_E

@d3x0r: Watching your two videos I see similar waveforms which I encountered when playing with this circuit.

I think that one can get a very low power draw if the transformer is just right and no other component besides the MPS18 and the three LEDs are used (but the LEDs will be rather dim).

Once some additional components are introduced (like in your circuit shown here http://www.overunity.com/14591/lasersaber-strikes-again-a-joule-thief-king/msg407881/#msg407881, a resistor, capacitor or diode) the LEDs will become brighter and the power draw goes up.

My experiments showed that about 1 mW are needed to make a LED shine nicely, but one needs the specified 60 mW to make a LED shine as intended by the manufacturer (really eye piercing bright).

Greetings, Conrad

d3x0r

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #272 on: June 30, 2014, 02:05:13 PM »
@d3x0r: Watching your two videos I see similar waveforms which I encountered when playing with this circuit.

I think that one can get a very low power draw if the transformer is just right and no other component besides the MPS18 and the three LEDs are used (but the LEDs will be rather dim).

Once some additional components are introduced (like in your circuit shown here http://www.overunity.com/14591/lasersaber-strikes-again-a-joule-thief-king/msg407881/#msg407881, a resistor, capacitor or diode) the LEDs will become brighter and the power draw goes up.

My experiments showed that about 1 mW are needed to make a LED shine nicely, but one needs the specified 60 mW to make a LED shine as intended by the manufacturer (really eye piercing bright).

Greetings, Conrad
Ya; going to try with some different coils soon (got some of the tiny ferrite pots).  The cap ended up being required... when I first started I had some copper tape I made the foil windings with; which ends up being that small capacitance.... and it worked just as it was; I had another coil that also worked without the cap and without the foil, but it was really tricky to start oscillating.  If I simplify it back to just the transistor I still wasn't getting the minor current draws... maybe I had excess LEDs...
The 10M resistor helps it start... once it starts, it can be disconnected; but it really doesn't affect the current significantly
but also the type/brand of LED affects the wave forms... those LEDs are at least the same that LS is using in the latest flashlights.

conradelektro

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #273 on: June 30, 2014, 02:40:01 PM »
but also the type/brand of LED affects the wave forms... those LEDs are at least the same that LS is using in the latest flashlights.

@d3x0r: yes, the LED or LEDs are a big factor. A red LED is really bad in this circuit. Also the direction of the LEDs is crucial. In one direction they are brighter but then the power draw goes up.

A good trick usually is to put a diode in series with the LED because the LED by itself is a bad diode (a lot of reverse current). But in this circuit it destroys oscillation (if no resistor is used, with the resistor it makes the LEDs brighter and increases power draw). So, the circuit seems to need some reverse current through the LED or LEDs if no resistor is used.

In general I have the impression that this circuit becomes a circuit with the "usual power draw" once it is done right e.g. with a diode to keep the base from going negative and with a resistor which biases the base of the transistor in the right way. It then also works with other transistors (not only with the MPSA18).

The most useful part of Lasersaber's JSRLooper experiments seems to be the idea to run a low power Joule Thief from a big electrolytic cap which can be charged by a little hand cranked dynamo or by charging the cap quickly from a battery which is then left behind.

Greetings, Conrad

d3x0r

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #274 on: July 01, 2014, 12:24:37 PM »
Today I have success! 
Yes the lights are barely lit.  Diode in this circuit kills all function; although I do need to keep cap, which is just 2 wires wound together for like 12 turns... measures something like 200 pF.... (was part of the cap study for TPP something pyramid power unit... )
Used laser saber's small core, primary measures 0.97mH (almost 1) and secondary is 2.5mH on tiny ferrite core.  The advantage of this core is the little wire being used is very low resistance....


I think somehow there is a small capacitance between how laser saber has placed his parts... like the circuit board itself as a dielectric between the top LED (furthest from base) and a connection to either power or ground (although I think cap to power is lower current draw, have not confirmed).
The wave of this coil is entirely different from previous waves.
Ran for near 15 minutes... but that's the full 10M ohm resistor + 400k.... (56mF)
I'll have to edit the video some, was a lot of dead space, eventually turned on some music in the background to kill some time, and eventually got a meter in shot across cap...
Will have to include a picture of my 'cap' too; just cause I like it...
I guess, the power supply was set at 11 volts, but I have a diode to the power supply ground and a diode to the power supply positive, so there's 1.5V drop... when I re-charged the cap at the end, it only went up to 9.5V, and that puzzled me until just now :)


It's enough light to read by I suppose... could be slightly better with slightly lower resistance.


more probably after many hours...
ya about 20 minute useful runtime I guess; it's still going after I stopped recording, caught up on messages and finished this one... 3 white LED
But they are MUCH dimmer than the target dimness I was going for...

-----
Edit:
LOL Youtube was kind enough to compile a music list for me....



Your video may include music that is owned by a third party.To hear the matched music please play the video on the right. The video will play from the point where the matched content was identified.
Your video is available and playable.
Here are the details:
"Immortal Technique feat. BigZoo-Positive Balance", sound recording administered by:
INgrooves
"Pink Floyd-Money", sound recording administered by:
WMG
SME
"Green Day-Brain Stew / Jaded (Radio Version)", sound recording administered by:
WMG
To learn more about how claims impact your videos ....


Guess I'll have to just truncate it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30xY6yhOHYg
« Last Edit: July 01, 2014, 11:44:52 PM by d3x0r »

d3x0r

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #275 on: July 03, 2014, 12:46:14 PM »
coil-cap...
I dunno how long... a few feet of wire coiled together to make a capacitor...

d3x0r

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #276 on: July 03, 2014, 04:23:10 PM »

Found this using super caps and a joule theif... LEDs in parallel on the collector side
http://www.lafamillecreative.blogspot.com/2012/02/amelioration-de-la-lampe-de-poche.html  He says he found them brighter in parallel than in series... might have to toy with that some...

(background noise; guy talking vaguely about electret effect... http://youtu.be/tZf0yhe4B80?t=11m29s )

was remembering a thing about electrets, and that materials used in supercaps demonstrated electret properties... somewhat related to 'dielecric relaxation' which causes caps to recharge after quick discharge and then allowed to relax...

Quote
http://edn.com/design/microcontroller-mcu/4214488/2/Self-adaptive-MEMS-vibration-energy-harvester-targets-low-frequencies
At vibrations of less than 0.2 grams at 50 Hz, Leti’s system was able to output 3V, reaching an output power of about 10 microwatts per gram of seismic mass. The resulting mechanical-to-electrical conversion efficiency was an impressive 60 percent.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Article:Free_Electric_Energy_in_Theory_and_Practice#The_Electret_Effect

More info (from here even) http://www.overunity.com/9878/captret-capacitor-and-electret/195/wap/

http://open-source-energy.org/?topic=1168.0

http://www.printedelectronicsworld.com/articles/big-future-for-titanium-compounds-in-the-new-electronics-and-electrics-00004744.asp?sessionid=1

scholarly articles on 'supercap dielectric relaxation'

------
But; Electret effects are very very low current (probably in the order of nano-amps) or have to be used in very high frequency (Ghz-Thz)?

But; my current setup I put 4 10F 2.7V caps in series (2.5F 10.8V result) and can charge it to from 4V to 8V in under a minute with this hand crank (thinking maybe a heavy flywheel you could rub against something... like this little windup toy truck things kinda) it would be less manual work... at least to top if off... it is quite a bit more torque required to be applied at 4V than at 7V... But then this lasts for an hour to go from 8.4V to 4.(1?)V  .... I was watching the voltage drop at 8.33 to 8.21 and it was about 4 maybe 5 seconds per 0.01V drop. so for 4.00V drop it should have been like 1600-2000 seconds or half an hour... at 30 minutes it was only 6.2V (rough memory)... so I let it sit another half hour and it got down to 4.5V or so... But I had the meter disconnected during the run, rather than when I was measuring I had the meter attached so it probably made the voltage drop faster when measuring...

And, this is running at a high brightness mode, with 4 LED and diodes from collector to power and from base to emitter connection to 10M resistor used to start the circuit and then disconnected.  Also made sure the core is clamped closed tightly...

while testing I had it just wrapped tightly with electric tape, at certain power levels the core would start to 'hiss' at me... so i applied more pressure... and at other power levels that it wasn't making a noise, I found at 14V circuit was drawing 0.01A (as reported by power supply, which is only very rough estimate) but applying additional pressure on the core made it go back down to 0.00A  (probably 0.009 or less reads 0.00).
coils measure 1mH (11-12 turns) and 2.5mH(20-24 turns) lost counts... but it's 5-6 windings across but my outer layers make me skip windings because I wasn't winding with a drill just by hand, and therefore inconsistent pressure.

So I dunno an hour per minute hand charging, might make it useful in caves( http://www.bosnianpyramids.org/ ) ... but maybe just converting to use batteries and run for days

d3x0r

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #277 on: July 03, 2014, 11:08:31 PM »
Added hand crank generator to charge, and an indicator LED with a zener to avoid over-voltage...
The generator can generate spikes(just a hypothesis) that kicks the oscillation into a higher power draw.  It is a chirp sort of wave whose frequency goes higher and higher until the 1n4148 on collector to power cannot divert the over-voltage back to power.... they go to +26V...


Happens more with a 2n2222
Maybe if I add a smaller cap closer to the rectifier it would help.  Without the rectifier, the caps just turned the generator as a DC motor :) 

TinselKoala

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #278 on: July 05, 2014, 06:54:36 AM »
So... UTSource does it again! About a week or so ago I ordered 10 ea. 2sk170 from them. Three dollars for the ten transistors, and four dollars shipping. And they arrived yesterday! They advertise 3 weeks delivery but usually beat that, but this time they really did well. They have a funny pricing system on their own website but now they have an EBay store and that is much simpler to deal with.

So now I have a small handful of special FETs. What to do? So I made a simple little test circuit that is an electrostatic field detector. Remarkably sensitive, it can detect the motion of a charged bit of plastic a meter away.
 
3V input from a CR2032 to the terminals on the left, and the open end of the 47K resistor on the Gate pin is the "antenna" for the EF pickup, and the blue LED with cathode at the transistor Drain and anode at V+, and Source of the transistor to V-  completes the circuit.





Pirate88179

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #279 on: July 05, 2014, 02:22:12 PM »
TK:

What a cool little circuit that is.  Can you light the led from "electro-smog"?  Like radio/tv stations?  Would a large antenna have to be added? (and/or an earth ground?)

I think it would be great to be able to light an led for "free" just from energy we are being bombarded with every day.

Bill

TinselKoala

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #280 on: July 05, 2014, 03:32:18 PM »
This one is powered by the CR2032 or other 3v battery. The transistor is a very sensitive, high input impedance FET, a field effect transistor. The ambient electric field (DC from a charged piece of plastic, or AC from a Tesla coil or Slayer Exciter type circuit) is picked up (charges or discharges) by the Gate of the transistor which opens the channel from Drain to Source, lighting the LED with power from the battery. The field just switches the transistor, it doesn't power it.
So this is different from the electrosmog harvester, which is actually powered by resonating with the electromagnetic field of the smog source. The electrosmog harvester needs its power source to be AC RF at its resonant frequency. The Electrostatic Field detector  isn't powered by the field, and works best with a DC field produced by a static charge, either positive or negative, but it will respond to an AC field too but not as strongly.
It's a neat little circuit and should work with most any high-impedance FET. A CMOS logic gate can also be used but doesn't give the graded quasi-linear response to the field strength the way the FET does.
It's pretty  neat to be able to control the brightness of the LED by wiggling a piece of charged plastic a meter away. The charge can be from rubbing a comb thru your dry hair, or acrylic plastic against cloth, or the E field of a tesla coil, or etc.  The actuating charge builds up on the gate so this distance will change as the gate charge leaks onto or off of the gate. I tried a 10 meg resistor as pullup or pulldown for the gate, didn't work, must use at least 100 meg I guess.

scratchrobot

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #281 on: July 05, 2014, 03:54:55 PM »
This one is powered by the CR2032 or other 3v battery. The transistor is a very sensitive, high input impedance FET, a field effect transistor. The ambient electric field (DC from a charged piece of plastic, or AC from a Tesla coil or Slayer Exciter type circuit) is picked up (charges or discharges) by the Gate of the transistor which opens the channel from Drain to Source, lighting the LED with power from the battery. The field just switches the transistor, it doesn't power it.
So this is different from the electrosmog harvester, which is actually powered by resonating with the electromagnetic field of the smog source. The electrosmog harvester needs its power source to be AC RF at its resonant frequency. The Electrostatic Field detector  isn't powered by the field, and works best with a DC field produced by a static charge, either positive or negative, but it will respond to an AC field too but not as strongly.
It's a neat little circuit and should work with most any high-impedance FET. A CMOS logic gate can also be used but doesn't give the graded quasi-linear response to the field strength the way the FET does.
It's pretty  neat to be able to control the brightness of the LED by wiggling a piece of charged plastic a meter away. The charge can be from rubbing a comb thru your dry hair, or acrylic plastic against cloth, or the E field of a tesla coil, or etc.  The actuating charge builds up on the gate so this distance will change as the gate charge leaks onto or off of the gate. I tried a 10 meg resistor as pullup or pulldown for the gate, didn't work, must use at least 100 meg I guess.


Nice little gadget, I will make one too.


Thanks for sharing.

TinselKoala

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #282 on: July 05, 2014, 11:58:38 PM »
You're welcome. By fiddling around and touching the circuit with fingers (gate-drain and gate-source) you can "tune" the thing so that it will either light up, or turn off, the LED in response to the same kind of charge. It seems to prefer having the LED on when the charged plastic is far away and progressively dimming the LED as the charged plastic is brought closer to the Gate resistor, but this can be reversed by "precharging" the Gate with finger-resistor pullups/pulldowns. I think. The thing is interesting to play with. It makes a great charged ping-pong ball detector!

pavqw

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #283 on: July 05, 2014, 11:59:01 PM »
My result is 3 hour runtime with 2 LEDs after some experiments with lasersaber circuit.
With some modifications I have even achieved overunity for couple of seconds!

It seems I've found very interesting phenomenon where overunity is achieved. I am not expert so it could be something very normal.
Simply it is in overunity for cca one minute where voltage is increasing (multimeter or any external source is not charging capacitor).
To get into this "mode" it is needed to add additional load into circuit so capacitor is discharging faster and after for example drop from 18V to 13V (additional load is unplugged) voltage starts to increase as in logarithmic curve (mostly it is cca +0.5V per minute). There is only one capacitor in circuit.
How is possible capacitor is charged on its own with LEDs on even for relatively short time? (measurement tools are unplugged)

I've not measured runtime of latest version because all my transistors are burned. Fortunately I've captured video but not so good, so I'll try it again with new transistors.

TinselKoala

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Re: Lasersaber strikes again. A joule thief king ?
« Reply #284 on: July 06, 2014, 01:01:20 AM »
Yes, it is very normal. Electrolytic capacitors have a dielectric recovery effect where they will recover charge after heavy discharges. With supercaps this effect can be very strong, definitely strong enough to cause the voltage to rise even when driving small loads. I've demonstrated this myself in videos, I think there is one posted earlier in this thread.