Tesla Coil Madness

[epoch19]

It's always been a dream of mine to to build a tesla coil.

Well, around Christmas time last year I backed a Kickstarter called OneTesla: DIY Musical Tesla Coil. A build your own kit that came with all parts needed including a stamped toroid to make your very own.
OneTesla kickstarter

This seemed like a nice way to jump into the world of coiling and make a musical one to boot.
So months and delays later my kit finally arrived. I set to work to put everything together. I finished building and it looks great.
Here are a few shots of the completed kit:

Front of coil

Back of Coil

Main Driver board

Gate Drive Transformer

Interrupter (what send the music to the coil)

Fiber output and MIDI Input

DC in and ISP

I brought it to the space a few weeks ago and tested it for the first time ( thanks Al for running the camera)

Coil in the back lot

A few videos of the trial runs ( run at <50% power on interrupter and 86VAC Line)
PS. Please forgive the quality its my first time uploading to youtube and using the camera for this
Maiden Sparks
Mario Bros
Tetris
Nyan Cat
Pirates of the Caribbean

The OneTelsa Community has been great and new issues and solutions are always being found you can find out more at their website
OneTesla

More to follow as I slowly tune in the coil and get better pictures/videos

[srw]

It was a great run tonight. Thanks for helping test my lightning detector.

Here's the video with the fluorescent tube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsjR1r0tmsw

[Kaldonis]

Heh. Check out this neat side effect from when you were running the tesla coil: https://www.dropbox.com/s/gbebw7l8eb84g ... .24.49.png

[FingerTech]

Just curious how safe is this? Can it potentially be a display piece at open houses and science faires?

[Kaldonis]

P.S. I completely blame the tesla coil for our now fried RFID reader.

[epoch19]

Yes it can be used as a display for open houses and such.

As to how safe is it? I think it may be more accurately put as, how safe can we make it.
Make it safer by putting up barriers, Faraday cages, separate room, announcements etc.

Probably should make an emergency switch as well in case barriers are bypassed.

[epoch19]

It's been about a year since I last ran my tesla coil so I decided to bring it to the space again and give it another go.

I've made several improvements since the the last time i ran and subsequently broke the coil.
First, I made that emergency switch I was talking about in my last post.
Second, I have added protection TVS diodes to the IGBT bridge.
I still would like to add a temperature sensor onto the bridge with a display so I can tell when I am running it too hot ( I have all parts but have not mounted things yet)

I took a couple more videos if you want to check them out.
Portal 2 Opera
Megaman 4 Intro
Megaman 3 Intro
Power Rangers
Axel F
Megaman 3 End Credits

Enjoy!