Selfrunning cold electricity circuit from Dr.Stiffler

[hartiberlin]

Hi Ron,
many thanks for the tips with the closed winding couplings. I have also seen, that sometimes it was better, when I pressed the 9 turn coil with my hand onto the litz coil. So I will now explore this deeper and try a closer coupling.
My next question is, does the pickup sense coil not have its own resonances with the scope heads capacitance ? Hmmm... I will try this and let you know. Ron, how many windings does your sense coil have and what wire diameter ?
Many thanks.

[DrStiffler]

Hi Ron,
many thanks for the tips with the closed winding couplings. I have also seen, that sometimes it was better, when I pressed the 9 turn coil with my hand onto the litz coil. So I will now explore this deeper and try a closer coupling.
My next question is, does the pickup sense coil not have its own resonances with the scope heads capacitance ? Hmmm... I will try this and let you know. Ron, how many windings does your sense coil have and what wire diameter ?
Many thanks.

Stefan here is the sense coil I use.

[retrod]

UPDATE: Well, I tried another radio and the same thing happens.

Hi Dave!  Have you tried introducing a permanent magnet into the vicinity while the AM radio is in feedback?  Stefan's video of the effects of a magnetic field in the vicinity of the coil was interesting, and i'm wondering if the microphonic effect is due to acoustic disturbance of the circuit, or if it's picking up a field from the speaker driver.  You might also be able to test it with some earbud headphones off of the radio.  Put one in your ear and the other one backwards near the coil to see if it picks up the small driver in there.

Just a thought..feel free to skip it!  

I'm not sure i know what i'm looking at, but it's an interesting thread nonetheless!

Yes, I have tried powerful magnets near the core and they do indeed have an effect. It was exciting to see but I found that repositioning the core while the circuit is operating had the same effect. With my crude ways of measuring I could not detect a 'gain' by using the magnets v.s. tuning. I did add a second litz coil in series at the plug (470uh) and left the core loose for experimental tuning. With this minor modification I am able to drive 56 LEDs and light the neon brightly while pulling 100ma from a 9volt radio battery. (Photo is from this morning).
I spent part of last night running the audio output of the transistor radio into the computer and listening through the headphones. This effectivly decoupled any accoustic signals between the radio and circuit. When set up for full quieting on the radio the core in the SEC circuit is highly microphonic. The stange part is the entire radio chassis is also microphonic. I believe if I added more audio gain I could use the combination of the SEC circuit and the radio as a microphone and record/capture my voice.
Oh, and pay special heed to Dr Stifflers advice on keeping lead lenghts short and close to the proto board. As you can see, you will barely see my circuit on the board.
Dave

[hartiberlin]

@retrod:
Well done.
Good to see you also using a second litz coil in front of the AP.

Now the next step would be to try to bring the input current down, while keeping the brightness at the same level.
By adjusting the coils on the core, move them around and using a magnet nearby you can play around, so that you will get almost the same brightness at half the input current. A scope to check the waveform at the collector to emitter or via a sense coil as Ron suggested will fully help.

Many thanks Ron for posting the sense coil pic.

[plengo]

@All,

now that I have "Thomas design" device working and scorpio posted his replication I must ask this question. Please no offence to anyone or Dr. Stiffler for this question. Look at the picture from scorpio and notice where I replace the left box with my FuncGen and on the right instead of an antenna I have my 250ft lamp wire cable about 23awg (well pretty much an antenna as EMdevices stated rightly so).

Why would using a FuncGen the LEDs being lit would be explained by "Stray Capacitance / Resonance / Transmission lines" but NOT Dr. Stiffler Thomas design device?

I am a little confused. How can I know, or what are the procedures should I follow (sorry for not being that well versed in electronics and electrical engineering principles) to know for sure both designs are not working because of RF? For me FuncGen and THomas oscilator are pretty much the same except that with Thomas design it self-regulates to the correct frequency while the FuncGen I must do it manually. With both designes I was able to light all those LEDs, have the neon lamp lit and exactly the same wave pattern on the osciloscope.

I am only trying to understand the difference because I believe there lies one of the secrets. I am pretty sure Dr. Stiffer has an answer for that (please Dr. do not be upset with my question even though I already seen this kind of question many times on the beggining of our quest on this thread).

Fausto.

ps: the picture shows that I connect one lead of the FuncGen to the 470p cap at the base of the transitor. Replace only the transistor, resistor, L1, caps from the battery and battery with FuncGen.