OneTesla Kit + 5 Coils
The OneTesla kit that got me into Electrical Engineering
In sixth grade, I received the oneTesla kit as a Christmas gift. I started working on it with my grandfather, a PhD. recipient in EE, as well as a retired electrical engineer I met through my elementary school. We had it up and running shortly. I remember having absolutely no clue how it worked or what was going on, but nonetheless it was the coolest thing. It also happens to be featured in the first YouTube video I ever uploaded back in 2015.
The secondary coil broke in storage, and after a few years, I decided to give a shot at fixing it. I rewound a new secondary, but I didn't get it exactly right, so the resonance was off. To fix this, I made a new primary coil out of 1/4" copper tubing.
5 Coils
As I mentioned in the Interrupter page, I saw this video of a Tesla Coil orchestra and wanted to recreate it. I was thinking that I could possibly turn this into an IEEE event, where a bunch of different students would work together to build coils. On top of making the interrupter, I designed a PCB Tesla Coil, which was somewhat of a mix between oneTesla's design and Loneoceans' driver board. This way, mass producing would be as easy as duplicating a DigiKey order.
The board is designed to be either a half-bridge or a full-bridge, depending on a jumper wire. On the bottom side of the board, I exposed some traces in the inverter section so I could tin them and increase the conductivity. I ran a 4-wire resistance test and the results were pretty good - the resistance dropped from 19mOhms to 1.9mOhms.
Before Tinning
After Tinning
So this is where the project stands. I've put it on hold, and I'll probably end up passing the torch on to someone else. The driver board works, but I never got the whole thing working together with a secondary coil. It just wasn't worth it to continue putting time into this project given how much it was going to cost, and given my other priorities like school work and the bigger coils. It was still fun though!