Plasma Speaker Sandstorm

Listening to some music on my computer with the audio coming out of a plasma speaker. The song is Sandstorm.

The technical details: Sawtooth wave at 30kHz is generated using a constant current source and a 555 chip. Then that is fed into a comparator along with the audio signal from a headphone jack. This generates a PWM signal which switches into a flyback transformer from an old monitor. Power supply voltage is 12V. Flyback primary is 10 turns.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• high voltage
• flyback
• sparks
• audio
• transformer
• audio-modulated

[juniortore1]

as good as an idea as it is, I would NOT use music straight from your computers sound card. If something were to fail you would get voltage kickback going INTO your sound card and possibly destroying other things in your computer. I had a friend kill an MP3 player from this and something randomly failed.

[mattg2k4]

@juniortore1

Yeah it's a risk, the main thing that can go wrong is if I let the flyback output arc to the primary circuit or the breadboard. Even in such a case, I would hope that the output would shunt to ground and stop the circuit before it arcs through the AC coupling capacitors and goes through the speaker's headphone output.

[mattg2k4]

@juniortore1

Course the proper way to do it is with an optocoupler or isolation transformer, but even those are usually only rated for a few kV, so it would have to be augmented with some filter and TVS diodes.

[Halofreak131313]

Hey man can you send me this schematic seeing as mine does not work

[mattg2k4]

@Halofreak131313

I never drew up a schematic, if you post what you did somewhere I'll take a look and see if I can figure out the problem.

[juniortore1]

@mattg2k4 Yes, Well, I know with Solid State Tesla Coils, your safe using an interrupter. But my friend who builds tesla coils, still doesn't risk his computer. He uses a 512MB MP3 player :D

Thats why 8 bit music is good, not only does it sound better in an arc (because its already square wave) but because the files are really small :)

Just saying :D

[blastmonkey14]

Lol, tootbrush. hehe. clever ;)

[xmaddict]

Cool. Like the DaRude song!