Artifabrians UNITE

[Quantus he/him]

Friends!  I am now building a Fabrial! And I stand by that description because, Comrades...Crystal Power!  I recently learned that Piezoelectric Transformers are a thing.  This means that I can make my power glove design work with a literal Crystal Power Module, rather that the (much bulkier) magnetic flyback transformer I was planning to use.  This makes my inner child so incredibly happy, you dont even know.

So Im going to come around and ramble about the progress of my designs every now and then, mostly to keep project momentum.  Im also going to randomly describe it in cosmere/realmic terms wherever possible, because reasons. 

 

For the uninitiated, piezoelectric crystals are everywhere, they are a really cool bit of physics where you can apply physical stress and get a burst of electric current (seen in those sparking furnace or grill starters), or conversely they will emit a very regular mechanical movement when an electric current is applied. Nearly every modern clock and computer uses these for precise timekeeping.  That was the limit of their usefulness as far as I knew, but it turns out you can use these for real Power distribution. The concept is similar to any other transformer (or lever or pulley system, for that matter) where you put energy in one side of an imbalanced structure and get a step-up or step-down version of that energy out the other side.  

In traditional magnetic transformers, you have to run an electric current though a coil, and if the current is constantly changing (ie AC power) that energy will move into a Magnetic Field. If you hold another coil within that field, the energy will come out the other end. Much like levers that trade distance for force, the relative number of tuns in the two coils will trade Voltage for Current.  Piezoelectric Transformers work in much the same way, except instead of moving the energy through the Magnetic domain to affect the change, it stores it as a physical force (vibration). One side of the piezo electric transformer is layered while the other is not, arranged in such they same mechanical vibration will yield different voltages and currents. 

Now, my goal is all about high voltages to get visible electric arcs as long  and showy as possible, but with relatively low currents (for safety as much as anything else).  This is the ideal application for PZT transformers, as the give a dramatic step-up in voltage (100:1) but doesnt scale up well for high current applications.  My general plan is to have a bank of deep draw batteries (chemistry TBD) providing anywhere from 12-30 volts, feed those to a resonant inverter circuit to drive the PZT, and feed the resulting output (~1200VAC @55khz) into a Cockcroft–Walton voltage multiplier to get me somewhere north of 20kv DC.  That will be the electricity available at the fingertips for basic arc fun.  I also intend to design the physical hardware to maximize corona discharge so I get a proper blue glow from the energized bits, but only time will tell how well that's going to work out.  

Secondary phase of this design will be to build a proper Marx Stack pulse generator into a baton, which should be capable of throwing over 100 kV. Which is also why I want the business end a solid foot or two away from me (this was the fundamental flaw in my old Marx Blade design).  Ive done smaller scale versions of this, they arent all that complicated and they utilize a satisfying number of spark gaps in the core function.  Looking into it, I should be able to also feed the glove power into several other fun things, including a coil gun or even a hand-held EMP (which of course I wont actually do because the FCC hates them). 

 

That's it for now, I will return with preliminary pictures.  Next step, reverse engineer the circuit on a laptop backlight power driver I found on ebay, or at least enough of it to cut into the right part of the circuit.  This is basically how I image Hemalurgy: a plan, a pile of unrelated circuit boards, and a hacksaw...  

[Karger he/him]

I really hate to ask this question but what do you need a power glove for and what is it supposed to do?

[Quantus he/him]

3 minutes ago, Karger said:

I really hate to ask this question but what do you need a power glove for and what is it supposed to do?

 

"Need" is a really strong word   It's primary purpose is to make my inner child giggle and clap like it's a magic show.  It's the same reason I have a back-burner project to incorporate a Wimshurst Machine into a double blades battle axe.  I enjoy taking things that sound like ridiculous fantasy and making functional versionS (If I could find a real mechanism that somehow needed a Pyramid for energy harvesting, hooo boy!).  Bur beyond that it's just so I can tell myself Im ready to be a Supervi- ahh... SuperHero

[Karger he/him]

1 minute ago, Quantus said:

t's primary purpose is to make my inner child giggle and clap like it's a magic show

It already did that to mine.

1 minute ago, Quantus said:

Bur beyond that it's just so I can tell myself Im ready to be a Supervi- ahh... SuperHero

I meant what is the functionality of it.  IE does it (I am being a bit ridiculous here just as an example) blast out force like an iron man repulsor?  To the best of my understanding you did not explain what it is supposed to do. 

[Quantus he/him]

14 hours ago, Karger said:

It already did that to mine.

I meant what is the functionality of it.  IE does it (I am being a bit ridiculous here just as an example) blast out force like an iron man repulsor?  To the best of my understanding you did not explain what it is supposed to do. 

In my head it will look like this:

But in reality it will be more like these.  Assuming I can work out some proper power limiting adjustment, the basic glove will work as a taser, arc generator, maaayabe a windproof lighter, and the least useful light source ever.  With the HV contacts on the fingertips, I'll be able to build contacts into the grip of those other devices like the Marx Baton, so it will be the primary power source for that 2nd stage gizmo

Corona Discharge around the fingertip hardware will look something like this:

 

Electric arcs between fingertips will be a lot like a jacobs ladder but Ill just have to play with the gap distances between fingers instead of letting it rise on wires.

And the Marx Stack baton will be almost precisely this thing, just portable and more linear:

 

Edited February 14, 2020 by Quantus

[GoWibble he/him]

@ChickenLiberty This is  so cool

 

Edited February 14, 2020 by GoWibble

[Karger he/him]

2 hours ago, Quantus said:

But in reality it will be more like these.  Assuming I can work out some proper power limiting adjustment, the basic glove will work as a taser, arc generator, maaayabe a windproof lighter, and the least useful light source ever.  With the HV contacts on the fingertips, I'll be able to build contacts into the grip of those other devices like the Marx Baton, so it will be the primary power source for that 2nd stage gizmo

That is awesome!  Asami cosplayers are going to want a bunch of them.

Edited February 14, 2020 by Karger

[+ILuvHats he/him]

This seems dangerous. In other words, just my kind of fun. @Quantus do you have plans to make the setup portable? I don't know how much the batteries would weigh, but they could probably be mounted on your back, right?

[Quantus he/him]

On 2/19/2020 at 3:06 PM, ILuvHats said:

This seems dangerous. In other words, just my kind of fun. @Quantus do you have plans to make the setup portable? I don't know how much the batteries would weigh, but they could probably be mounted on your back, right?

Definitely portable, though I doubt Ill be able to (safely) have as much current as that Marx stack picture so it will be a thinner/weaker arc.  I shouldnt need a full backpack size battery.  The battery chemistry is going to be the deciding factor there, I need something that is tolerant of high current and quick discharge.  I cant use normal alkaline batteries, but I have had good luck with rechargeable Nickel–metal hydride before (ran a similar system off 8 energizer AA's once upon a time). The vaping trend has led to some great strides in small, consumer available Lithium-Ion which are perfect for what I need (vapes are basically just blasting as much wattage as they can through a heating element) and they are getting better, safer, and cheaper by the day.  Worst case I can get some low profile Lead Acid batteries at the local Batteries Plus store, I was pleasantly surprised at how small some of them are, I'd only ever seen the big brick style for engines.  

 

 

Picture time, my crystal Transformers have arrived!  I have some bare ones, but I on the advice of a helpful redditor was able to get a pre-built driver circuit that were made for laptop screen backlighting.  I have to figure out what all the input pins do, which will be a whole other puzzle (that Im going to try crowd-sourcing to reddit).  GRound is easy to figure out, but I need to figure out the main power rail and it has a power control/trhottle in there somewhere.  I've been able to track down a datahsheet for the main control chip (the big square one) but it has a lot of options and Im not sure which they are using here.  Oh, to be clear the coil in the middle is a balancing inductor, the actual crystal transformer is the black thing on the far left

 

Edited February 25, 2020 by Quantus

[The Voiceless One he/him]

I whole heartedly approve.  I can't wait to see how this looks.

[Quantus he/him]

Short update (Since I havent done a whole lot of work on this since the plague began):

After a bunch of digging into the components on the pre-built driver circuit pictured above, Ive decided not to use it, and instead step back to build my own driver circuit.  The square chip on the right side is the main controller chip.  It's great in that it has in-built protections and frequency feedback, but it has two major downsides: the biggest is that it has a maximum duty cycle of 50%, meaning I would not be able to run the transformer at 100% capacity (it prefers something in the 30-40% range). The other issue is that the way it was configured for this driver module it requires an external frequency-based control signal, and if Im having to provide that I might as well cut out the middle man and just do the driver control directly, as that sort of frequency controller would involve many of the same components.  The chip has a mode that would eliminate that need, but to change it's mode would require re-working traces that are about a half-mm long, and frankly my hands are not that steady with my current caffeine habit   Messing with SMD components and working at those sizes take a whole different soldering method than what I have the tools to manage.  

I did manage to dig out an old test apparatus of a (really rough) marx pulse generator I built a few years back to run some experiments on the corona discharge, but I fear that a grounding short may have fried it's primary transformer so I wasnt able to get glow-to-power requirements I wanted to pin down.  It was never particularly strong or efficient, with hand-twisted spark gaps and those tiny capacitors (compare to the soda can size ones in the large picture above)

 

[StarrFall]

@Quantus First off, this is way cool!  Now for the inquisition: Are you shooting for fingertip to fingertip arcing only, or do you think you could get more range out of it?  Can you serialize PZT Transformers to get the power shaped to your target (seems like they would be fairly particular about their input range and so may not chain well unless you get the right one in the right place) or is it a throughput issue that parallel transformers might address?  Not suggestions, I'm too ignorant to suggest anything here and usually rely on off the shelf parts and microcontrollers for my fun, just questions to sate my own curiosity and you are clearly educated in this arena 

Edited December 22, 2020 by StarrFall

[Quantus he/him]

34 minutes ago, StarrFall said:

@Quantus First off, this is way cool!  Now for the inquisition: Are you shooting for fingertip to fingertip arcing only, or do you think you could get more range out of it?  Can you serialize PZT Transformers to get the power shaped to your target (seems like they would be fairly particular about their input range and so may not chain well unless you get the right one in the right place) or is it a throughput issue that parallel transformers might address?  Not suggestions, I'm too ignorant to suggest anything here and usually rely on off the shelf parts and microcontrollers for my fun, just questions to sate my own curiosity and you are clearly educated in this arena 

I dont think I'd be able to get much actual range on the glove safely, for the same reasons I've (mostly) abandoned my Jacob's Ladder Fork-Sword: the distance for the arc to jump back around the hilt & protective glove to me is generally shorter than the range I'd be getting out of it.  That's the general idea behind the second-stage devices like a baton.  The glove will act as a fist-stage transformer and feed a larger but also simpler second stage compressor stack, but the danger end can be a couple extra feet away from me.  

As far as I can tell chaining these in a serial configuration wont work.  With these crystals the voltage produced is directly related to the physical/mechanical stresses in them, so attempting to operate them outside their design range will quickly crack them. My general plan at this point is to use several in parallel to increase the total current available, then use some other second stage process to step up the voltage from there.  I'm also looking at inverting half of it so I can get double the voltage differential.  The idea would be that the index finger is held at high positive voltage, the pinky at high negative voltage, and the thumb would be the ground point.  

The current state of this, and the design challenge I need to dig into, is that the above driver circuit  i bought wont work well for my purposes, at least not without a lot more complex driver circuit and some IC's which I was hoping to avoid for purely thematic reasons. So I need to design my own, but it needs to be resonant (able to follow frequency changes as the arcs jump around) and Im not sure yet how to pull that off with a PZT short of working up a well-protected feedback link from the HV output.  

Edited December 22, 2020 by Quantus

[StarrFall]

2 hours ago, Quantus said:

I dont think I'd be able to get much actual range on the glove safely, for the same reasons I've (mostly) abandoned my Jacob's Ladder Fork-Sword: the distance for the arc to jump back around the hilt & protective glove to me is generally shorter than the range I'd be getting out of it.  That's the general idea behind the second-stage devices like a baton.  The glove will act as a fist-stage transformer and feed a larger but also simpler second stage compressor stack, but the danger end can be a couple extra feet away from me.  

As far as I can tell chaining these in a serial configuration wont work.  With these crystals the voltage produced is directly related to the physical/mechanical stresses in them, so attempting to operate them outside their design range will quickly crack them. My general plan at this point is to use several in parallel to increase the total current available, then use some other second stage process to step up the voltage from there.  I'm also looking at inverting half of it so I can get double the voltage differential.  The idea would be that the index finger is held at high positive voltage, the pinky at high negative voltage, and the thumb would be the ground point.  

The current state of this, and the design challenge I need to dig into, is that the above driver circuit  i bought wont work well for my purposes, at least not without a lot more complex driver circuit and some IC's which I was hoping to avoid for purely thematic reasons. So I need to design my own, but it needs to be resonant (able to follow frequency changes as the arcs jump around) and Im not sure yet how to pull that off with a PZT short of working up a well-protected feedback link from the HV output.  

I had missed the bit about the baton, but I read more carefully and am glad to see you have covered the topic of transference of power through contact points on tool and gloves, because if you are going through all this trouble then you probably OUGHT to make it as cool as possible, lol.  Cursory search of PZT warned that they likely were not super flexible within individual units; wouldn't be surprised if you could get others geared to catch what first line is throwing and step up even more, but also would not be surprised if that broke the bank.

I've had no luck altering chips in the past, but have been party to (not driving) boot-loading of chips and it didn't seem overly onerous as compared to my expectations.  Especially given real-estate is precious (and odd) in your use case, DIY may kill a few birds with one stone anyway. 

[Condensation she/her]

This is amazing! I know next to nothing about this kind of thing, but I'm just going to say that this is awesome and I'll try to figure it out.