New comer needs any and all help

[jhsmith87]

the lights i am trying to power, well it dont really matter much i guess, i just need it to be very bright. i have a small garden inside, very small. right now the light i use for it, is usually 4 to 5 CFL's i guess i could use LEDS but i bought the CFLS with the highest lumens, (i assume you know what lumens are) just in case it is the amount of sunlight like light brightness, for lack of any better way to describe it.
i wonder how many leds it would take to provide enough light for a small plant? how many lumens does an LED have? i dont know.
i understand i need current, i could have 1k volts and with out a bit of ampers its basically useless.

with the diagram you gave me before the complicated one, and using the wires, transistor and input power i am using i should get a good bit of power right?
what about using 2 transistors in series or parallel with the exact same set up i am doing now, but just two transistors, what would that do? would that increase anything?
also on the coil i have, i have three windings, first i am trying out the 10t 18g input and 100+t 28g for pick up. then i will maybe try out the other winding for either input or pickup, its like 23g maybe 50 to 75t. and use the 18g still for primary. or switch it up use the 100t for primary and the 10t for pickup. i am going to test it out and try my best to see the difference but since i have no way to measure current due to my multimeter fuse, it will be very hard to tell.
but before i get it up and going and testing different ways i would like to see what you think the difference would be in making that kinda change.
also give me your opinion on the dual transistor. whats your thoughts on that

[TinselKoala]

I don't know about the dual transistor setup, I've never tried it. I've been meaning to though, maybe tomorrow I will and I'll let you know how it works out.

I have used a bunch, like 18 IIRC, CFLs in a little vegetable garden myself, but I never thought about powering it with a JT. That's a great idea if it can be made to work. I don't know how many lumens a plant likes, but I do know the brighter the better as long as you can keep everybody cool. If it gets more than 85 degrees in there it's probably too warm.

I think that the pickup coil should have lots of turns, and that the low-voltage primary should have the fewest turns, and the secondary that powers your load should have around the same as the pickup coil, give or take.

You could measure current in the following way, by measuring voltage. Get a 1-Ohm, 1 or 2 Watt resistor and put it in series with the current you want to measure. Then use the voltmeter part of your DMM to measure across this resistor. You are measuring the "voltage drop" from one end of the resistor to the other. Then you apply Ohm's Law:  V=IR, or I=V/R. So your current in Amps is equal to the Voltage drop divided by the resistance and since the resistance is 1 ohm, you just read off the current directly from your voltmeter. If it says "0.040 V", that's a drop of 40 milliVolts over a one Ohm resistor.... equals 40 milliAmps. If you use a 0.5 Ohm resistor, then you just use I = V / 0.5 . I've found some good resistors to use in the old TVs. Look for the white rectangular blocks, and the light grey/green resistors that have printing instead of color code on them, find the 2.2 ohm or the 1.0 ohm ones and use it for your "current monitoring resistor", the lower the Ohmage the better, but 1 Ohm is the easiest to use.

[jhsmith87]

Wait so u say use three windings for this project? If so where would the pickup coil wires go.

[jhsmith87]

I'm giving up seriously. I can't even build something that simple I followed your directions step by step used everything mentioned to a tee I tested out on 1 AA battery just to see the voltage increase I would get a complete waste of my entire day I tried switching different leads I tried every resistor I have hi even tried winding another  Coil. With different gauges and number of turns on both wires. I've been working on this for well over 12 hours now and I have not got any difference in voltage for the most part the change in voltage was decreased by 1 bolt from a double a battery I've built 1 of these before I tried following a diagram but got confused but somehow accidentally got 1 to work but since then I've tried and tried and tried and have never been able to get 1 to work again this is definitely much simpler then the motor you help me build.  But for some reason I cannot get this to work at all so I've just given up all hope I've got the motor still put together and I'll hold on to that but as far as trying to build or make anything else I just don't see it anyway possible that I am capable due to my lack of knowledge to be able to build anything else even something this simple. I'm so frustrated at this point I've just decided to give up on any other experiments as much as I enjoy building them there's no joy in building something for hours and it never worked. If only there was some type of idiot proof wait to do it and for me to learn how it works why it works what makes it work.  I just can't see myself wasting the hours of wasted on this simple project anymore or any other projects for that matter this is completely ridiculous

[TinselKoala]

Hey, calm down!  Believe me, your frustration is shared by me and by many others, on projects like this and on others. Take a walk outside, it's a beautiful day here at least.

Please don't get discouraged; there might be some really simple reason why you aren't getting what you want. Maybe you've damaged a transistor by overheating it, or maybe you are misinterpreting a diagram, or maybe your parts supplier gave you bad parts. The 2n3055s that I bought from RS a couple weeks ago both failed, one immediately and one after a couple of hours, but the ones that I bought from my other supplier, made by a different manufacturer, are still running strong.

If you want, we can go step by step. If you can take pictures and upload them, that would be very helpful.

Let's start with your goals. At this point I think it would be a very nice feeling for you if you got your circuit working.  If you made a simple, low-power JT that would light up some plain LEDs, and it worked, would that help restore your confidence and enthusiasm?

Also, back up a little bit and look at basic skills. How is your soldering technique, etc. I have helped people build things, and in more than one case I discovered that the person didn't realise he had to scrape the enamel off the ends of the enamelled magnet wire in order to get a connection. This is nothing to laugh at.... the person was grateful to learn of this error and how to fix it and his circuits worked thereafter.

Myself, I've done silly things like get transistors backwards too, and much worse. Once I destroyed a 30,000 dollar (when new) piece of test equipment, an HP frequency counter, by accidentally tweaking the knob the wrong way on a high voltage device I was testing. I've nearly killed myself by blowing up HV capacitors, wasted hours and hours trying to track down faults in malfunctioning equipment when they were just unplugged from the power supply..... found whole batches of bad components from suppliers and manufacturers.... and tried to build circuits that simply were wrongly drawn. When I was a kid, for _years_ no transistor project I built would work. I finally figured out, much later, that I was probably using too hot a soldering iron and the wrong kind of solder.

Lately, people bring me old, inoperative equipment that they are throwing away, and when they find that I've repaired and calibrated the unit, they want it back, and of course they don't want to "make it worth my time".

A few years ago, I completely restored and recalibrated my old ex-NASA Tektronix RM503 oscilloscope. Literally days of work, got it working to factory new standards, new tubes and everything. Then I left it on overnight to "burn in" and stabilise. The next morning it was dead, blowing line fuses. I spent days again, trying to track down the fault, and couldn't. I lugged this dead scope around with me to the West Coast and back when I moved a couple of times. A year or so ago I decided to look at it again, and after a day's frustrating work I finally found that the mains transformer's CRT filament winding was leaking high voltage into the rest of the transformer and blowing the fuse. It is impossible to replace that transformer. SO.... I just put a completely separate transformer to supply the CRT filament in there. Now the scope works again and I leave it on for weeks at a time, it's running right now making 4-oscillator Bowditch patterns. You have no idea how frustrating that project has been, but I finally conquered it and was successful... and it was because, in the intervening years, I learned more and I developed my troubleshooting skills. The actual repair, once I figured out what was wrong, took about an hour and I had a suitable transformer in my parts bin, so it didn't even cost any money that I hadn't already spent. The hardest part was trying to find a mounting spot for the extra transformer inside the case.

Feel better yet? I hope so.... please don't get discouraged.