Lightning machine fix

Shouldn't the lightening come before the sound?

Mike.

That's not the point ? The machine only strobes. I'm looking for a sound activated light that will pluse with the sound instead of just strobing.

Please describe what you have and what you want it to do.

Mike.

The metal sphere is 3 ft diameter. 240v 60a input produces 12 ft long sparks sound is in time with the sparks I am only 30 ft away. It only takes a micro second for sound to travel 30 ft. 27 ft diameter circle of sparks in our back yard. It makes my remote control garage door go crazy up down up down up down changes directions at random times over and over. All garage doors within 2 blocks are going crazy also. Several people standing outside wondering why is every garage door on our street going crazy. All the security alarms in 5 block radius are going off also.

You'd have to start by defining what audio frequency band you want the device to pay attention to. Do you want bass/beat response or full spectrum audio?

gary350 said:

The metal sphere is 3 ft diameter. 240v 60a input produces 12 ft long sparks sound is in time with the sparks I am only 30 ft away. It only takes a micro second for sound to travel 30 ft. 27 ft diameter circle of sparks in our back yard. It makes my remote control garage door go crazy up down up down up down changes directions at random times over and over. All garage doors within 2 blocks are going crazy also. Several people standing outside wondering why is every garage door on our street going crazy. All the security alarms in 5 block radius are going off also.

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You sound like a nightmare to live near.

Mike.

Pommie said:

You sound like a nightmare to live near.

Mike.

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In my mid 20's I constructed a van de graaff generator hybrid that was closer to a pelletron electrostatic generator capable of producing an estimated 750kV. Seems like every time I fired that thing up it would rain shortly afterwards ... perhaps the clouds were jealous. Felt as though I was a bit of a weather warlock.



One of the last HV experiments I did was a high speed corona motor ...


... And a 13-Stage Marx generator powered from a 6-cell Laptop battery...

When I was at college they had a room that looked like Frankenstein's laboratory, with a massive Walton Cockcroft multiplier, massive circular spark gaps, and a huge Jacobs Ladder - I can't remember what else?.

Despite our requests, they never demonstrated it working, as apparently it wiped out TV and Radio for the entire town - and it was only ever fired up occasionally on open days.

It must have cost a fortune, and I could never see what it there for, particularly as it couldn't be used?.

Nigel Goodwin said:

... they never demonstrated it working, as apparently it wiped out TV and Radio for the entire town

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When I would fire up the MARX generator you see in the video above, it had to be battery powered. Anything else would back-feed across the power supply over the mains and knock out several computers (at least enough to cause them to reboot)

Beau Schwabe said:

When I would fire up the MARX generator you see in the video above, it had to be battery powered. Anything else would back-feed across the power supply over the mains and knock out several computers (at least enough to cause them to reboot)

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Wasn't a problem at college, as it was home pre-home computer

However, they did have a computer at college, but it was a valve based one in it's own room - I believe it was donated to the college, I've no idea if it ever worked? - again, we were never shown it working.

We did however once access the Open University main frame via teletype, at 100 baud or what ever

It was a different era!.

In college many years ago they had what they called the AC lab. One on the demonstrations they did was to brake a huge motor to get the mains frequency to change and you could see the lights beating in time. They also had a huge inductor that they would turn of with a knife switch causing a very large arc to form.

When I started work at Long & Crawfords (High voltage switch manufacturers) the test department tested (through tank) bushings at 21kA during lunch break by paralleling up three phase transformers onto one phase. One day we observed a test but the current didn't switch off (supposed to after 3 seconds). The oil started to get very hot and the Chief Engineer started to run away. Me being young and naive didn't realise anything was wrong and stayed to watch. Luckily the current was cut off shortly afterwards.

Like you say Nigel, a very different era.

Mike.

When I started college the course I did was ETV (Electronics and TeleVision) a four year day release course that replaced the previous RTV (Radio and TeleVision) seven year course. Both courses were for TV/Radio service engineers.

Anyway, I started straight in the second year ETV2 (as I had a Physics O-Level qualification), and after ETV3 where I got exceptionally high marks myself and a few others were 'promoted' to T3 - a Technicians course where you usually went after doing the old seven year RTV course.

But T3 went exceptionally badly - though no one complained (and some students were in their tenth year!!) - until I did

It came to a head when they gave us a coil, a galvanometer, and a magnet - with instructions to drop the magnet in the coil and see what the meter did. So I was just staring at it, completely bemused, when the lecturer came up and asked what I was doing?, so I turned to him and said "well I'm not doing this load of crap for a start, there are people here in their tenth year of college, and you've got us doing first year secondary school physics?".

Need less to say, he wasn't pleased - he stormed off to go visit the head of college, presumably to get me expelled - however, it brought everything to light, and it turned out due to a complete cock up they had us doing the wrong lessons in the wrong rooms.

Which is the reason for this post - we were in the heavy machines lab - huge motors and generators everywhere - and when we did phase shift (again something we'd all done years previously anyway) we didn't use a 10K 1/4W resistor and a little 1uF, fed from a signal generator. No, the resistor and capacitor were three feet high, in steel casings, with wheels - and for the signal we wired them directly to live three phase mains, using bare copper screw terminals on the wall.

I was horrified at the complete lack of safety - I've been horrified at insulated screw terminals, but these were just bare copper.

Incidentally, as far as courses go, there seems to be pretty well zero Electronics courses available these days in the UK, unless you got to University and pay a fortune to take a full time degree course. We've taken on an apprentice, and the only even 'slightly' relevant course we could find is a general engineering one. He's been on the course now about four weeks, and basically done nothing except maths so far.

Back to the topic of this thread - We cannot modify the strobe circuit if we cannot *see* the strobe circuit. Please post the schematic.

Separate from that, this is not a simple modification. The audio signal must be peak-detected and filtered, but that is the easy part. It is common for a low-power, low-cost strobe to run directly off the AC mains with a high voltage R-C delay circuit to create the trigger signal. Replacing that with the filtered audio signal is certainly doable, but tricky.

ak