My musical Jacobs ladder

The music is coming through fairly weakly. WE can hear it clearly but faintly but unfortunately you can barely hear it in the video above the crackling of the arc.

But never the less hear it is:

**broken link removed**

Now that does have 'Wow' factor.

You have managed to get the arc jumping across several inches of open space.

As you say, the music is hard to hear. I'm sure with a little more work you'll find a way to bring it out better.

I do not know what waveform must be applied to do it. But I have seen videos of the giant singing Tesla coils. Sparks several feet long playing music very clearly.

BradtheRad said:

Now that does have 'Wow' factor.

You have managed to get the arc jumping across several inches of open space.

As you say, the music is hard to hear. I'm sure with a little more work you'll find a way to bring it out better.

I do not know what waveform must be applied to do it. But I have seen videos of the giant singing Tesla coils. Sparks several feet long playing music very clearly.

Click to expand...

Tesla coil will be a near future next step. But in the interim I am going to have a ***** at winding my own flyback transformer using a ferrite core from a tv flybakc transformer......so that I can get HV AC rather than HV rectified AC.

I might then try using this to drive a tesla coil. I also have a couple of ignition coils I could try.

After all the previous heart ache around kick back, burnt out gate drivers, fried mosfets and trying to learn about RCD snubbers etc I think I have gotten my driver circuit pretty stable.

I have had it running for several minutes at a time with nothing blowing. Oh apart from my flyback current limiting resistor (5W) which kept frying (got those out of old tvs so they didn't cost me anything anyway).

In the end I made my own 5R resistor out of nichrome wire that I extracted from a discarded heater. I wound it around a piece of cement sheeting and it seems to work just fine despite the fact that it glows red hot. I need to mount this properly so it doesn't melt or buirn anything.