I'll try to describe this in words....
I have these Joule theives that I have been playing with; I wound 1, and it worked, I wound another and it worked, so now I'm way down the way :) But, off the the collector I have wired in the battery collector of a bedini motor, since the spike I see looks a lot the same, actually much sharper instead of milliseconds, microseconds.... And I put in a battery that was dead, and it was a nice resistance, and the charge slowly increased. The battery is totally dead, the voltage drained from it quickly; I used instead a few caps so I could capture the voltage, and could charge to like 8.5 from the overdrive return spike to the transistor. Adding that, however, lengthened the low time of the pulse. I need another scope, there's at least 4 points I want to see to track the sequence of events, and figure out where the real current draw is.
So then I got clever and was going to use that higher potential, low amp circuit to drive another joule theif. This potential is above the positive of the original. I found that if I tried to scope using the wrong negatives used for the ground, I killed the circuit. I have a secondary coil on the primary joule thief that drives 31 LEDs in series (that's quite some spike from <1.5V). When I connect the secondary joule theif, it runs, and oscillates rather well (how can I limit the current the secondary draws from the capacitors? ) ; the LEDs go out, and I can power maybe 8 dimly(?) Maybe I get like no power on the primary's secondary pickup? When I disconnect the joule theif, the LEDs slowly come up to a brightness (as the caps charge?); I can run a lower frequency joule thief from the back emf, if I can find it. I think I want the diode to the base instead of to the collector.... which is why I want to know more the seqence of events.
http://www.fight-4-truth.com/H.o.%20Simple%20Motor%20II.jpg (http://www.fight-4-truth.com/H.o.%20Simple%20Motor%20II.jpg)
(http://www.fight-4-truth.com/Schematics.html (http://www.fight-4-truth.com/Schematics.html))