Joule Thief

[jeanna]

Hi Sm0ky2,
Thank you for your explanation.

I cannot get any amplitude of current, or any current on my scope, just volts.
As far as I know, anyway.

If I am just making a joule thief circuit the amps draw is something, lets say 50mA
When I put a secondary coil onto the toroid, the mag flux spikes as the volts of the primary do but in a greatly amplified manner.
The dmm is unable to determine a change in the primary jtc pulse circuit, and in fact if it sees any change, it usually goes down if I add some leds to that secondary.

I concentrated a lot of effort last year on how to make something of those spikes, and make something greater from them once they were produced by the primary pulse circuit (the jtc)

Maybe we are talking of 2 different things.
I have not used the transistor C-E for a led since the beginning.
I have been looking at the addition of coils that use the same pulses at different places in the circuit, but not the C-E junx.
Gadgetmall said he had ou from doing something with a cap at the C-E junx, and whether it was ou or not doesn't matter to me. but when a large capacity boost cap was connected to the transistor C-E, I could not use the secondary at all.

I will try your suggestion to see what is available from this very limited GP = galvanic pile. It could tell an interesting tale.

Thanks.

Also, btw, wilby is usually right in his comments. It takes me a while to understand what he is getting at, because I must try everything myself first. ( just my way )

thank you,

jeanna

[sm0ky2]

@ jeanna

the only time i used the C-E cap was when i was powering it off the Earth Battery. for some reason this was necessary, until i figured out how to draw more current from the earth.

where i primarily used my caps was on the secondary.
what i found was, the bigger the load on the secondary, the more it consumed the flux created by the primary (which means less field makes it into the core), and this drops the current through the primary. what i mean by that is,. even though you will measure more current being used from the battery while the secondary is active...  the current feeding through the C-E (your primary LED) lowers.
its like the secondary sucks the magnetic induction right out of the primary coil.

the most interesting results i had was when i was playing around with double-rings. the secondary would step up my voltage and operate another JT circuit, on a larger ring.

i haphazardly used a 2-diode rectification into a cap. think i was trying to get a measurement of the second JT's secondary output.
and overcharged its voltage on accident.
1 diode in and 1 diode out.
i had it placed on the secondary coil of the second JT
and it caused a 2500uF, 50v cap to litterally explode. the top of the cap split open in puff of smoke (powdery stuff?)
bad idea......

[jeanna]

the most interesting results i had was when i was playing around with double-rings. the secondary would step up my voltage and operate another JT circuit, on a larger ring.

hmm That is what I was expecting to happen when I put the output of one jtc as the input to another.
I was not able to do that. (but I discovered a lot of cool things.)

I don't remember seeing the details on that from you. Did you share them?
Did you have a whole second jtc? or did you use the pulses from one primary to excite 2 toroids, one of which was larger than the other?
(That is an interesting idea even if it wasn't what you did.)
...

i had it placed on the secondary coil of the second JT
and it caused a 2500uF, 50v cap to litterally explode. the top of the cap split open in puff of smoke (powdery stuff?)
bad idea......

eeesh...
yeah, better be careful.

I have the scope and do not need to take that kind of risk. I am glad of that.

-----
Being able to double the step-up voltage would help a lot because if I am going to start with 25-30mA and 1.5v from an air battery/galvanic pile I want to get at least 7 spiky volts from the secondary so I can run a bunch of leds in parallel at full brightness.
I have done this with a longer mag ribbon on a bigger copper pipe (essentially a bigger pile), but this is a limit I would like to push.

The other thing to do is to add a repeater cap across the secondary wires for what I call a joule toss. That works.

Please explain how you made a second level joule thief work.

thank you,

jeanna

[sm0ky2]

@ Jeanna

i dont know if i commented a great deal on what i was doing. there was a lot of learning going on, i asked a bunch of questions
repeatedly when necessary, until i got someone to explain it in a way that made sense (you helped a lot during those times!)

i toyed around with the "daisy-chain", running 2 and 3 additional cores off of the original JT, power levels scaled down on each additional core, and it was dissapointing...

this one here was the set-up i had the most fun with.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9RgjAgSQOg

what i did here was place the emitter connection of the original JT in place of the + "battery" on the second, larger JT circuit.
the - is connected to the negative battery side of the circuit.
which is common-ground.
so theres two transistors here, same old (mostly) dead battery i was using the whole time, and i managed to light up quite a few LED's rather brightly. you can see them in the video even with patio lights on.
looks like in this one i had 1 LED across the C-E of each JT, then 4 on the secondaries of each core. when i removed the LED from the original (1-inch) JT, the rest got brighter. i eventually gave up on that, because my 7-inch core is not the proper material.
its an old tempered-iron ring, was made for hanging... something..
eats a ton of energy, to build up a field.

[edit] - correction: after looking through my cores and finding the one unsed in that experiment, that is actually a stainless steel alloy, from a stand type thing. but it has similar negative effects as my iron cores.

[Pirate88179]

The only time I attempted to chain 2 JT's did not work out well.  I did not try too hard though because I realized (possibly incorrectly) that the primary needs dc and the secondary outputs ac.

But now, thinking about it, my EER puts out either pulsed dc or ac and I can run JT's from that so, now, I don't really know.  I had always thought the primary input HAD to be dc.....maybe not.

Bill