Electric guitar pickup - electricity demonstration project

[jemmus]

Hello,
I'm here to ask for some help on my daughter's science fair project. She wants to demonstrate how electric guitar pickups create electricity by having a steel string vibrate above magnets wrapped with copper wire. The idea is to make a display where you pluck the string and a light bulb lights up.
Questions:
1) Do you think a guitar pickup (passive single coil type will produce enough power to light up a bulb? Say, an incandescent flashlight bulb? Here's the information I'm finding on typical power output:
-1 Henry
-7-8 Ohms
-6-8 kHz voltage output.
Enough to make a flashlight bulb flicker pretty good?
2) If not, any suggestions on something else that would display the electricity produced? Say, an LED or a tiny speaker? I need something that I can easily obtain on the internet or by cannibalizing something at home.
Any ideas appreciated-- thanks!

 

[MrAl]

Hello,

An electric guitar pickup only outputs a very weak signal which normally is then amplified with some kind of audio amplifier and output to a speaker.
To use it as some sort of actuation device you would still have to amplify it and the output would go to a light bulb or better yet a small LED.
You might get away with using transistors, but an op amp would help a lot here. You could use a very high gain and maybe drive an LED directly from the output with a series resistor for the LED. You could probably use a 9v battery as the power source.

 

[SimonM]

Care must be taken for one fact: the signal coming out of your pickup will oscillate between positive and negative...Once you amplify your signal, it will go positive and negative in a wider range..Hence, you should put two LEDS or one normal light bulb. Normal Light bulb doesn't care about direction. LED does. You can put two LEDS in parallel (I.E. One for each direction) and you will see the LED flashing from one to another (if you choose a low enough tone for your string, for that matter I strongly sugest a bass string or a low E guitar string).

MrAl advices is good too! An op amp is surely the way to go to amplify the signal!

If you need further advice or help, let us know !

Simon