Joule Thief

[altrez]

@xee2

Nice work!

-Altrez

[nievesoliveras]

Hello everybody!

Thank you @jeanna
Thank you @electricme

The led trio I put yesterday on the circuit seems to do something wrong with it.
Today I changed the battery for another discharged one with 0.44v and the circuit sucked all the energy from the battery leaving inside of it 0.0v.

After an hour it rose to 0.3v after some more time it rose to 0.5v, at this moment is 0.8v.
At this rate of charging it will take a week to charge.

The trio led was discharging the battery and I took it off after aprox 2 hours. yesterday.

I need to replicate one of the good toroids on this threads, that can light the trio without effort from one AA battery.

If I get it to work properly I will solder it to a pc board and make it permanent.  The connections get loose sometimes and I need to move them in order that the circuit keep going.

I need to check the diodes one by one to see if anyone is fried or broken as the other diodes I used before that got broken in two halves.

Best wishes to all!

Jesus

[nievesoliveras]

@all

Bad news.
The ferrite bar coil got overheated and quit to work anymore.
One interweaved wire side got grayed somehow.

Jesus

[stprue]

@all

Bad news.
The ferrite bar coil got overheated and quit to work anymore.
One interweaved wire side got grayed somehow.

Jesus

Grayed, that sounds like the interior of the wire insulation has been comprimised from heat or a short.  Sorry to hear!

[jeanna]

@ jeanna

... I would like to find out what is happening so that we can all share our measurements.
===
Just to be sure, you are measuring the voltage across the capacitor using the DC setting on your DMMM I hope.

A test you could do to check the voltage would be to put a neon bulb across the output of the pickup coil (without the diode and cap and voltmeter). If the neon lights you are getting over 100 volts out

Well, I didn't see that post til I had finished this test.

I did check the hi voltage on the DMM before I went to sleep, and it read 25volts where the scope, which is what I had been using all along and reporting, said all those much higher numbers.
My dmm is the kind you buy in a hardware store and is meant for electricians in home setting. I suspect the sample rate.

This morning I rewound the secondary in 2 different configurations.
I can light a neon just fine. (Not as bright as with a MK1 fully wound around a smaller toroid, however.)

Actually, here is what I have to report.

I made a hazens kind where I wrapped the 2^o 10 times one way, then returned 10 more for a total of 20 turns and carefully interspersed the winds.

The results seemed to go down a little bit to
205v, 197v, 221v,  2.77KHz (maybe)
All the spikes were going up and most of the time nothing registered on the screen. I moved the x axis down to nearly the bottom and many spikes began to show. They are still skinny tall infrequent spikes. I do not believe the 2.77KHz, but that is the freq between two that I could actually see.
At one resolution, I actually saw a progression of spikes going up then down like the up side of a sine wave made of spikes. That was followed by a great long gap without spikes at all.

Last, I remade the 20 turns into a mk1 style 2^o.

At first the volts were down about the same amount as the hazens style, but there were more of them. Still very hard to see or stop the scope and look while on hold, though.

at 200r:
197v, 205v, 198v, 218v, 17v, 54v,

then I began to tune the resistor. I turned it down. I didn't check this one but it suddenly got very loud and changed pitch.
volts I saw were,
126v, 494v, 353v, 492v, 19v, 122v,

I wondered how much more so...

at 33.8r I got the top reading of 648v !!
Needless to say, I am being very careful with my scope.
The spikes continue to be very thin although one or 2 now have a little more thickness at the bottom. They still fly by.

648v, 224v, 302v, 481v, 591v, 623v.

The spikes seem to be pulsing at 555Hz verrry sloooow by our standards.

So best reading and lighting a neon

33.8ohm, 648v, 555Hz
MK1 style 20 turns.

I am only sorry I didn't tune the Hazens one while I had it wound. I am also sorry I never checked the resistance on that interim reading because that is where it started to take off.

Lots of info.

xee (and stprue too),
This is something I could ask you to do too.

Please make your secondary in these 2 different winding styles , but please tune the Hazens style one because I forgot. Of course you should also tune the MK1 style so we can compare.

thank you,

jeanna