Testing the TK Tar Baby

[MileHigh]

TK:

Just a few quick comments and I will try to post more tonight.

I checked your watt meter:

The Model 2330 Sampling Watt Meter is a precision, high accuracy, auto-ranging  watt meter which simultaneously measures and displays true rms Voltage, true rms Current and true mean Power over a frequency range from dc to more than 600kHz.

So the signal is above the bandwidth of your meter.

For the battery automatic cut-off:  You low-pass filter the battery positive signal and feed it into an opamp configured as a comparitor.  You use a trim-pot to set the comparitor threshold.  The output of the opamp resets a flip-flop.  The oputput of the flip-flop drives an NPN transistor that keeps your relay energized until the low-voltage trigger event happens.  You want to make the capacitor in the low-pass filter big enough to filter out glitches so that you don't prematurely trigger.  You have to be sure that your low-pass filter does not disturb the oscillations on the battery positive lead.  I can explain more this evening if you want.

PW:

I would run the wire in line with the magnetic North-South underneath the compass.  That way you are applying torque about the vertical axis when there is current flow.  Adjust the distance between the compass and the wire for varying the sensitivity.  If the wire is perpendicular to North-South then in theory there is zero torque about the vertical axis when you have initial current flow.

I really doubt that you would need multiple turns of wire and that's adding more inductance.

All in all, I really like the idea.  It would have been perfect for the original RAT circuit and I think it would be fair to call it the "Compass of Doom."   lol

MileHigh

[TinselKoala]

@ TinselKoala: 

Your careful experiments demonstrate how difficult it is to understand what a weird circuit is doing, not to speak of making meaningful measurements. (That explains the many misconceptions put forward by overunity experimenters.)

Question: From the discussion just above this post I gather that you try to measure tiny deviations from the expected energy output or input of your big batteries (a tiny little bit less flows into the batteries than comes out to run the circuit)? But the claim of the "inventors" of this weird circuit is that the effect is massive. So, even a crude measurement should proof or refute it?

Yes, you are right. But the claim of the "inventors" is actually already refuted by the data that they themselves have posted, when it's correctly analyzed. Anyway, anything that I measure on this circuit will be denied by them, even if I produce self-charging batteries. Much of my current purpose consists in a hopeful attempt to spur them along, to test their circuit rationally and purposefully, and post their results in a clear and coherent manner. I hope I am providing an example of one way to do this.

Assumption 1: You want to show that the weird circuit consumes a tiny bit more than it feeds back to the batteries (as common theory would suggest)? Which is difficult, because the power consumtion of the circuit is very small in comparison to the huge capacity of the batteries?

Assumption 2: You want to show that the transistors are not even switching and that only some low power high frequency AC current (in fact a malfunction or misoperation of the circuit) is flowing through the circuit in an unexpected way?

Assumption 3: You want to show that only during a neglected and short adjustment phase (when the transistors are indeed switching) some really strong current is flowing through the circuit doing the claimed heating?

What I hope to show is that "my" circuit performs the same as theirs. So far, I've shown the things you state are indeed true for my circuit, operating with the IRF830a mosfets, and I believe that they will also be true for the IRFPG50, but this is yet to be determined. If we could only get them to perform real tests like I show, we would know more about their circuit's performance. Your Assumption 3.... the only way we can know this about _their_ circuit is by careful examination of their data where it could be revealed, or by very simple tests. I have even shown live on camera that my temperature actually climbs, and the waveforms that are associated with that. Have we seen anything like this level of detail from the NERDs, even though they are claiming "opensource" and "public domain" and COP Infinity? No, we have not. But we would like to, certainly.

Sorry for the stupid questions, for a layman it is easy to loose track of your objectives. The subject matter is rather complicated (and you are doing a good job to dissect it in order to show the real issues at hand.)

Conrad

No apology is necessary. There is a real difference between "stupid" questions and good questions. A "stupid" question might concern my height or my appearance or my moustaches or how many Watts are there in a Joule. All your questions seem to be good questions to me, not stupid at all.
And you are also right: it is indeed important to focus on real issues..... COP INFINITY and an attempt to gain a monetary prize with that claim.

Regardless of how the battery charging claim plays out, I am getting more concerned about this load heating issue right now. I would really really like to see some solid evidence that their load actually heats significantly when the oscillations are present and a strict negative-going pulse is used.

Stll, the NERDs only seem to be claiming 12 Watts of power dissipated in the load. Since P=I^2R and R is around 10 ohms, this means I = sqrt 1.2  or about 1.1 amps. Still seems implausible based on my maximum  current during oscillations only of around 200 mA with a strict negative pulse, but certainly reachable with overdrive on the gate or with a tad bit of positive offset or a bipolar pulse with oscillations.

[TinselKoala]

TK:

Just a few quick comments and I will try to post more tonight.

I checked your watt meter:

So the signal is above the bandwidth of your meter.

Yes... the oscillation frequency is above the stated bandwidth of the meter. Is it the oscillation that is supposed to be recharging the battery? I guess it is.... the power that is lighting up the LEDs, sitting on top of the DC signal, is the only thing in the circuit that has been shown to have the power to do so.

But then why isn't it charging my batteries?

I understand your concern, though, and why you might not accept Clarke-Hess data on the output side of the Tar Baby. But what about the input side? The batteries themselves should act as a low pass filter, and as humbugger and 0.99 have shown in sims, the battery voltage really isn't rippling hardly at all when measured correctly.

For the battery automatic cut-off:  You low-pass filter the battery positive signal and feed it into an opamp configured as a comparitor.  You use a trim-pot to set the comparitor threshold.  The output of the opamp resets a flip-flop.  The oputput of the flip-flop drives an NPN transistor that keeps your relay energized until the low-voltage trigger event happens.  You want to make the capacitor in the low-pass filter big enough to filter out glitches so that you don't prematurely trigger.  You have to be sure that your low-pass filter does not disturb the oscillations on the battery positive lead.  I can explain more this evening if you want.

No, I got it, and I have all the parts on hand. I'm just not sure I want to go to the trouble at this point. I need to see proof of load heating under their strict negative going pulse, or produce it myself, before I'll believe that they even have their knobs and buttons set right.

PW:

I would run the wire in line with the magnetic North-South underneath the compass.  That way you are applying torque about the vertical axis when there is current flow.  Adjust the distance between the compass and the wire for varying the sensitivity.  If the wire is perpendicular to North-South then in theory there is zero torque about the vertical axis when you have initial current flow.

I really doubt that you would need multiple turns of wire and that's adding more inductance.

All in all, I really like the idea.  It would have been perfect for the original RAT circuit and I think it would be fair to call it the "Compass of Doom."   lol

MileHigh

OK... but I don't think that the needles will respond very well to 4 MHz ac, and we already know the direction of the DC current flow, don't we? Still, I'll try it if I can arrange my bench well enough. Later though-- I have to go to work today.

[TinselKoala]

@pw:
Yes, I used some compasses in earlier videos, but I don't think it was to indicate current in a wire. Eddy currents and magnet polarities, something like that, IIRC.

I remember old Prof. Oersted and the difficulties he had with compasses and currents. It took him a while before he got that one right, and all of us in his class got a big laugh out of it at the time.

Of course I'll try it but I don't want to magnetize my good map compass so I'll try to find some little toy ones.

(Or I could use that ballistic galvanometer sitting over there on the shelf....)

[picowatt]

TK,

Actually, of all the proposed tests, the idea you had regarding "light bulbs", or a variation thereof made the most sense. 

Two sets of fully charged batteries, a quick check of Rint on both, one set runs the "black box" for a perod of time, disconnect the "black box" and then apply an equal load to both sets of batts and run them down to a predetermined voltage, recheck Rint, recharge and swap.  A bit time consuming, but I think it was a very good suggestion.

Have you scoped across Vbatt?  In one of the RA tests in particular, I see an assymetrical amplitude of the osc about the Vbatt line that I find interesting.  I was just wondering what you see there.  I believe the RA scope shot I am talking about was in test 3 in the first "rossi" paper. 

PW