DIY Overclocked Plasma Globe. 2500V to a MILLION volts

I recently got a deal on some plasma globes on eBay and while they are pretty neat I feel like with the right modifications they could be a lot cooler now I have a general rule that before I go tearing into stuff I like to at least try the original product. now what can you do with a plasma globe? well for one you put your hand on it like this you get a little arc that goes up to your hand it's pretty cool but I mean honestly this isn't gonna keep me entertained for that long like the thing isn't even a fire hazard. is that too much to ask for consumer electronics? now luckily this whole fire hazard issue can be simply solved with just a roll of aluminum foil. but first a warning. the craziness that is probably about to unfold over the next 10 minutes or so was done completely for educational purposes in fact if you were to try any of this stuff at home you'd probably die so yeah please don't do this home. a piece of aluminum foil on top capacitively couples to that inner electrode and now you can see it can draw more current. now it can even pull a little arc from the surface which which is pretty nifty no I wonder what it feels like on my finger ooh it actually tickles oh wow it's cool drawing an arc from my finger all right now it's time for a more important test and that's whether it can burn stuff so here I have a match and hmm doesn't seem to be doing anything so I covered the match and aluminum foil that way the foil touches me and can complete the circuit through ground so let's see if it lights the match is arcing...not quite lighting it. -one eternity later- yes there it goes sweet that was actually pretty cool. all right now I'm bored this thing needs a lot more power so I'm gonna tear it apart. so I went ahead and torn out that plasma globe and what can I say, I'm not impressed with this driver I feel like Nikola Tesla who actually invented the plasma globe would be rolling in his grave if he saw this driver like he was doing this stuff over a hundred years ago and his stuff was way better than this puny little thing. if you go on Google and look up how to make a high-voltage circuit this is literally gonna be one of the first results. it's like child's play in the realm of high voltage electronics but regardless this thing works by using this 555 timer here to generate a square wave signal to this power transistor then this feeds into this flyback transformer where the rapidly changing currents causes a relatively high voltage to be produced and then it's fed through this long lead here into the plasma globe so how do we make this thing stronger? well the dumb way would be to just feed higher voltage into the thing but that's probably just gonna blow the timer before anything interesting happens so I guess the next best option is to a feed a higher voltage into just that transistor itself or even better use this transistor as an amplifier to feed an even bigger transistor and then dump even higher higher voltages into that alrighty so this is what the new setup looks like so I start by feeding the output of this scariac here into this IQ level 500 AC to DC converter and from that that feeds into this MOSFET here which is the main switching component of the new driver and it's funny because this this power transistor here that was originally feeding the flyback transformer is now acting as just a little amplifier that powers the gate of this MOSFET so yeah let's give this thing a try man I feel like this scene that's such a great job of giving off the essence of hobby electronics so let's dive right into this because what could possibly go wrong. so let's start feeling a little bit in the voltage there and hmm oh boy over what's going on there? so apparently due to my sloppy wiring I ended up frying this little power transistor it's not like it really mattered in the first place so now I just have the output of the 555 directly driving the gate of that MOSFET so let's give this another go oh sweet Oh something broke. did ir really fry that easily? no it's trying to go. oh well look at that I love when that happens It let out the magic smoke this project has been a great reminder of how much I suck at electronics so I'm gonna say screw this driver and instead uses a ZVS driver which is much better and also use a flyback transformer that's at least ten times bigger. not even the slightest glow? so that's how it's gonna be is it? you know I guess it wasn't really the plasma Globe's fault it's probably the built-in rectifier inside that flyback transformer that's preventing me from getting nice arcs in the globe. alright screw this. I'm breaking out my massively over driven car ignition coils because if this doesn't do it I don't know what will. all right let's give this thing a try well it's certainly better the noise is definitely an added bonus but I still can't say I'm that impressed like there weren't even arc shooting out of the glass I think I can still do a lot better. now I'm sure if I were to drive this coils even harder I can make the globe a little bit brighter but really at that point I'm just grasping for straws because what I really want is to draw the maximum of power I can possibly get from my electrical socket. I want giant arcs of electricity to shoot directly out of the glass. I want a million volts to come from my driver to feed into the globe. now how does somebody like me generate on a million volts? well in fact I don't need fancy IGBTs or field effect transistors, in fact I don't need silicon at all. what I do need are microwave ovens. microwaves are full of parts that are useful for the electronics hobbyists and can be sourced for cheap or even sometimes free so let's tear this thing down. now I should point out that nobody without extensive electronics experience should ever go poking around in a microwave oven reason being you touch the output of this while it's live you're dead you touch this without discharging it first you're dead you break this and inhale the dust and before long beryliosis comes creeping in slowly suffocating you and sucking every bit of life out of you until finally you're dead anyway the main thing that I'm looking for is this transformer here now unfortunately it only does a little over 2,000 volts but luckily I can string a few of them together for higher voltages but I'm going to need more microwaves I need transformers with relatively similar electrical characteristics that way they don't fight each other when chained together now I found four that match each other quite nicely and I wired the secondaries in series in the primaries in parallel and of course accounting for phasing now if you try to chain any more than four of these together then the voltage is just going to blow through the windings on the secondary but even at just four for this can be an issue so to prevent this I mounted them in these ammo cans here and then I submerged them in mineral oil. now this arrangement gives a voltage about ten thousand volts which is certainly impressive but off by a factor of 100 of what we actually want. so now what? this is where we get to look back at the ideas of Nikola Tesla uhhh....not that one. and definitely not that one he didn't even work on that. can we just stop it with this whole free energy conspiracy already? ah yes that one. the magnifying transmitter. or even better the modern-day equivalent which is the aptly named Tesla coil the Tesla coil is a type of step-up transformer in which the primary and secondary sites form tank circuits and they're tuned so that they resonate the same frequency they're capable of generating extreme voltages well in excess of a million volts now luckily many of the materials needed for a Tesla coil can actually be found at a hardware store. for my primary coil I used 3/8 inch copper refrigeration tubing as the conductor now a wide conductor is really important because the skin effect makes thinner wire quite resistive at radio frequencies I made some mounts out of acrylic to hold the primary windings in place and then mounted it here on this coffee table. on the primary side I needed a tank capacitor rated for the grueling high voltage high current operating conditions of a multi kilowatt Tesla coil but off the shelf these are very expensive now some people make their own capacitors out of things like beer bottles and foil but these tend to be quite lossy I ended up meeting the middle by building a bank of smaller pulse capacitors which gives great performance at a much lower cost. for the secondary side I needed a coil with over a thousand turns now I start a winding one by hand but without access to a lathe this task turned out to be quite painstaking so I ended up just giving in and buying a fully wound coil on ebay for 60 bucks four and a half inches wide 22 inches tall and 1,200 turns now I stuck a small top load from a much less awesome Tesla coil on top to increase the capacitance on the secondary side. the final piece of hardware to add was something to switch the primary tank circuit at well over 100 times per second while also allowing the capacitor bank to charge it before firing. now I don't even want to know the cost of transistors actually rated for something like this so I ended up following the path of many other Tesla coilers of the past and built an asynchronous rotary spark gap. I started with the absolute cheapest angle grinder I could find which turned out to be a fourteen dollar unit from Harbor Freight. now for the spinning disk I use bakelite because it's both a great electrical insulator and it's also tolerant of high temperatures so I cut into something close to a circle and yeah I was never quite the arts-and-crafts kind of guy. so I stuck it on a bench grinder and then ran it against a file and after a few lungfuls of formaldehyde later I had a nice circular disk. i mounted brass acorn nuts as the flying electrodes and then used brass bolts for the stationary electrodes now when the angle grinder spins the electrodes into place the 10,000 volts jumps the gap and allows the primary circuit to oscillate. now when the gap fires it is incredibly loud nearly deafening. it's funny because there's probably even a little bit of laser emission coming off that gap considering the ambient nitrogen that's getting zapped by the high voltage. and here is the completed driver it definitely looks terrifying. I went ahead and added some warning stickers there just to keep people safe then also one thing I want to point out is I added ten of these microwave oven capacitors here to act as a capacitors ballast and then over here I have my spark gap mountain and there's my capacitor bank so yeah I guess we're ready to try this thing out now first I want to test this Tesla coil without the plasma globe on top that way it can compare it to the original plasma globe driver because the plasma globe driver doesn't even make any visible Corona when it's ran in open air. so let's see if this Tesla is any different. all right here we go. man why don't we even do this kind of stuff? it's hard to convey just how loud that spark actually is so the new plasma globe driver clearly works and actually produces sparks in midair unlike the old driver but I guess that was expected considering this new driver draws 350 times as much power as the old one. it's time to test this driver with the plasma globe attached. i added this nail here so i can feed the output of the coil directly into the globe but in hindsight I should have used iron for this because iron has a very high magnetic permeability so it's equivalent resistance due to the skin effect it's going to cause very high losses but truth be told I'm actually shooting this part after the fact and I've already blown up on my plasma globes so there now it's art. all right here we go let's hope it doesn't explode on the very first run check out those amazing patterns but still though it's not shooting arcs out of the glass but I think I can fix this. just like I did earlier I'm gonna stick some aluminum foil on top that way it capacitively couples to the top of the coil and it's funny because at these frequencies whatever capacitance that this arrangement has is going to have an incredibly low impedance so the arc should just shoot straight through the globe ah yes there's that wonderful arc that I was after it shoots two feet out of the top of the glove which i think is pretty impressive but maybe could we do even better if we add more foil to the thing? I used aluminum tape this time instead of foil because it sticks to the sides better now this time I actually have five pieces as opposed to one so let's see how this thing performs you know it's funny you'd think after all the time I just spent building this new driver I would have remembered to actually attach the plasma globe to the thing but as they say science can't move forward without breaking some omelets or whatever I stuck another globe on the driver and this time used some zip ties to keep it held down now for my next experiment I want to see if I could use this thing to remotely power up another plasma globe try doing that with an off-the-shelf plasma club. let's give that a try with some fluorescent tube lights aka the much less awesome plasma globe equivalent now I know what you want to ask. is the new plasma globe of fire hazard? well let's test it with some very special balloons amazingly for all the experiments you just saw I was only running the power supply at half the power I built it for but even so the voltage it generates is so high that arcs back to itself now on the left it hit the ground you strike rail but that's fine because that's what it's meant for but on the right the strike came back and hit the secondary coil and it's only going to take a few more of those to completely destroy it so in future videos I'll be sure to add a much bigger top load and then see if I can pull off doubling the input power now I feel like I'm going to get some complaints about the title of this video because my plasma globe was just over volted now overclocked right? well technically was overclocked and no it can't run Crysis but the original driver had a frequency of 23 kilohertz and the new one has a frequency of 265 kilohertz so it's actually been overclocked by a factor of more than 10 but yeah it was totally clickbait. all right so that's enough insanity for today and I actually think this is gonna be my longest video yet so if you actually watch the entire thing I'm pretty impressed but I first I'd love to give a big thing you tell my patrons on patreon because if it weren't for all your generous support I want to be making videos for YouTube anymore so a big THANK YOU to you guys in fact I'm gonna let you guys see this video first before I make it public anywhere else and uh yeah you guys should also check out my Instagram page because I post a lot of project updates there before you see them anywhere else so there's a link in the description be sure to check that out and yeah until the next time stay safe and happy lazing

Channel: styropyro

Views: 4,064,752

Rating: 4.8688416 out of 5

Keywords: plasma, globe, satire, plasma globe, tesla coil, tesla, nikola, quad, MOT, arsg, spark gap, diy, overpowered, overclocked, electricity, mods, modifaction, hack, electronics, science, powerful, high voltage, laser, burning, extreme, mod, stronger, experiment, ignition coil, zvs, flyback, 555, how to

Id: Oij-BdIkPgQ

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/monjorob]

That was awesome. I can’t believe I watched that whole thing

[u/borednerd55]

When Scout and Engineer switch brains

[u/sayaphsy]

damn this guy really knows his shit.

[u/niconpat]

This guy is like electroboom with the wisdom of youth.

[u/WeaponexT]

This motherfucker bout to start the Mist

[u/Dauss]

If you'd rather skip the construction and explanation (not recommended) you can jump to about 10:17 in this video to see it in action.

[u/xxirish83x]

I’m pretty sure I saw this kid on vice or something... making laser guns

If I remember correctly he live in Illinois. His workshop is in a storage facility.

[u/heywatchthis308]

Pretty rad

[u/I_LOVE_POTATO]

Awesome video as always, /u/styro_drake!