Musical Tesla Coils

[Dashmellow]

House of the Rising Sun

Sweet Home Alabama

 

[GJHS]

Very cool find Dashmellow

 

[kamkar]

Best part is that they play real music, and not the poo that have come out the past 2 decades

I would like too but hooked up to the perimeter fence around my house

 

[GJHS]

Here you go
http://onetesla.com/products/kits/onetesla-musical-tesla-coil-kit.html

 

[Dashmellow]

Here you go
http://onetesla.com/products/kits/onetesla-musical-tesla-coil-kit.html

The Tesla Coil in this link is very cute but for a perimeter fence I think I'd want the ones in the videos! The one in the kit is about a foot tall and can generate a spark two feet long (maybe).

The ones in the videos (The 15 Kw "Beast") are seven feet tall and can generate sparks more than 13 feet long at half a million volts! Apparently, a 25Kw version called "The Hog" is in the works! It's described as "the Tesla Coil to rival all Tesla Coils".

The coils were built by electrical engineers Eric Goodchild and Steven Caton.

Read more on Goodchild's web site: http://www.goodchildengineering.com/tesla-coils

Steven Caton's web site is: http://stevencaton.com/.



The kit built oneTesla:

 

[Dashmellow]

When I was 17 years old I built a Jacob's Ladder using an old neon sign transformer I came across in the garbage out in front of a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, NYC. Basically, all I really needed to add was two long welding rods. It was pretty cool! It looked and worked exactly like the ones in those old Frankenstein movies; huge angry sparks running up the ladder. The only problem was that I found out after awhile that when I ran the thing it blew out everyone's radio and TV reception for like MILES around. It was the talk of the neighborhood and nobody was too damned happy about it .....and I was afraid I would get in trouble if people found out it was me, so I quietly ended my mad scientist experiments and dismantled it.

So, remembering this got me thinking.......... I wonder what these giant Tesla Coils do to local radio reception? They must emit enormous amounts of RF noise across a broad spectrum.

The Jacob's Ladder I built was much bigger that the one on this video.

 

[USDashCamera]

i dont get it, the electricity alone is making the sound? thats nuts. or is there a keyboard also?

 

[Dashmellow]

i dont get it, the electricity alone is making the sound? thats nuts. or is there a keyboard also?

The electricity is indeed making the sound. The extremely high voltage converts some of the air around the coil to plasma (the purple stuff you can see from the sparks). This plasma when it's created forces some of the surrounding air out of the way very powerfully creating a pressure wave that propagates away from the spark at the speed of sound. This phenomenon can be controlled. This is accomplished by turning on and off the solid state Tesla Coils at a very fast rate of speed to make a specific number of sparks over a given amount of time. By precisely controlling the frequencies emitted by the plasma sparks it is possible to create music. It is somewhat analogous to how an audio speaker works. When the cone in a speaker moves back and forth it also creates a pressure wave that propagates at the speed of sound and that pressure wave is used to reproduce sounds.

So, with a Musical Tesla Coil the sound is controlled with a device called a "Tesla Synth" (a musical synthesizer) built by one of the two engineers (Goodchild) who created the coils. Apparently, some of the hardware is fairly simple but the controller is extremely sophisticated and it took him two years to develop as it includes many complex algorithms. The software that runs all this is pretty complex as well. They use the Tesla Synth as a live MIDI controller to control the coil hardware in real time when staging these events. You can read more about all this on Goodchild's web site.

 

[kamkar]

hehe it have allways been my oppinion that the size of sparks tell how Little a person want uninvited visitors.

I remember playing Red Alert back in the old days, there was a tactic we used called a tesla rush.

Not a rush but a lot of tesla coils is allso a good defence

 

[extraoneya]

I do believe we have a Electrical Genius type lurking about.

 

[Dashmellow]

Lurking? Who's lurking?

 

[extraoneya]

Best part is that they play real music, and not the poo that have come out the past 2 decades
I would like too but hooked up to the perimeter fence around my house

I have to disagree...make that 3 decades...no wait.....it's 4!

Remember, it's the duty of us old farts to complain about everything that originated after we had r turn in the limelight!

 

[kamkar]

I would like my elektrified fence to play this one

Dont come a knocking if the fence is rocking

 

[mel]

i dont get it, the electricity alone is making the sound? thats nuts. or is there a keyboard also?

The electricity is indeed making the sound. The extremely high voltage converts some of the air around the coil to plasma...

There was a pair of HiFi speakers demonstrated on TV many years ago (Think it was on Tomorrows World) that worked on the same basic principle, basically they were electrodes in a faraday cages, wired to some clever electronics. As they had no diaphragm to be dampened by the air, they were supposed to sound better than any conventional speaker, but they didn't say anything about all the ozone, or UV, or RF they presumably must have been generating.

 

[GJHS]

I would like my elektrified fence to play this one

Dont come a knocking if the fence is rocking

Maybe this would work

 

[Dashmellow]

So much for the physics discussion.

 

[extraoneya]

........snip.......Dont come a knocking if the fence is rocking

On a FENCE????.......gezz, u must be limber.

 

[extraoneya]

So much for the physics discussion.

this never did impress me as a place where the guys wearing lab coats hang out....more like the crowd that smoke in the boy's room.

 

[Dashmellow]

I have to disagree...make that 3 decades...no wait.....it's 4!

Remember, it's the duty of us old farts to complain about everything that originated after we had r turn in the limelight!

You're exactly right, couldn't agree more.

Kids today, it's such a shame, what with their piercings and tattoos and texting and bad music.
Why can't they be good kids like we were.....with hair down to our shoulders, dropping acid, smoking dope, freaking out and rolling in the mud! And with good music!

 

[Dashmellow]

this never did impress me as a place where the guys wearing lab coats hang out....more like the crowd that smoke in the boy's room.

I don't know about the lab coats but I hope we can sustain an interesting, intelligent discussion......at least for a little while. Ehhh....kids today......