Joule Thief Dream Coil

[unzapped]

I am trying to get some prototype toroids machine wound.

As most of you here have much more experience with JT's than I, would you please list the exact specs of the toroids if you were to be able to have them machine wound? Like the dream toroid.

This would be the primary JT toroid bifilar. Probably like .75 inch OD

Material
Wire thickness
# of windings.

Please keep in mind we do not need to be practical here. Not many people will wind 1000 turns... but these machines will do it in minutes!

I will be looking for like three to begin with. Then testing. I will mass produce the final ones if anybody wants some... I am very lucky to have a manufacturer right in my home town who is willing to work with me. Please allow me to pass this advantage to the community as well.

I am meeting with them next week.

Thanks in advance.
UZ

[jeanna]

UZ,
It is the secondary that needs the machine.

The primary is very easy to wind and you probably want to get it tuned before you go there.
If you must go in there blind, get the highest permeability you can.

Tune it by using a 20T secondary and watch what you can get off the secondary using a range of base resistance (a pot) and different transistors (2N2222, 2N3904, TIP31, TIP3055). The little ones draw much less amperage

The experiments are not finished yet, but there are definitely things to produce.
Who is the company?
I have a lot more to say, but it will narrow down the conversation to know who the company is and what toroids they can choose from.

Cool.

jeanna

[unzapped]

Thanks

The company is right here in my hometown... They do all sorts of custom windings. I am in direct contact with the owner. We are meeting next week to put some prototypes together.

Anybody that can help me spec the prototypes, I will make sure gets some goodies!

@Jeanna,
at this point my interest is to create a circuit that will fit in my mag lite cell. This is my first and only JouleThief so far.

YouTube - Mag lite Joule Thief Unzapped Cell UPDATE

I will need a small secondary so everything will fit. I have not built a secondary set up yet... I plan on it this weekend.

Any help is much appreciated... Thank you.

[jeanna]

Great

What you want to do is very easily done.
The mag light has such a large space there is very little restriction.
A AAA is a little tight and a AA is hard but do-able. This is roomy.

I usually tune my toroid as I described in the last reply, then I figure about 7-8 spiky volts per led in series.
If that maglight has leds in it they are most likely parallel so you need to double check.
If you are putting the leds in yourself, then you can do what you want.
8 turns is probably safe beginning place for each led.
A 2N2222, or 2N3904 is going to take a lot less amps draw and will do this job easily and well.

The place where you will need some winding help is when you have a 0.7 inch toroid and you want 120 turns because you want to light an unmodified LoA bulb and get 400 spiky volts.

Are you hoping to make some of these for sale? A product?
I am hoping there will be a few people out there who will want to sell these lights or light bases so people who do not want to make their own can use these.
I personally already had a business and do not want to repeat those activities, so this delights me.
And, I am very happy to help. I think our world needs this kind of thing everywhere.

thank you,

jeanna

[unzapped]

@jeanna
Have you seen my video? This is a 2D cell size mag lite with a 3w hi output led... Not sure how to tune for that beast.

As far as selling goes? Who knows. I am a really good internet marketer... I just have never had anything of my own to sell!

I might do something, but probably more on the home front... I really like your lights. I was thinking that maybe I could build one that ran off a candle and a peltier. I would love build that into a product.

So you dont think I need a secondary then?

UZ

[jeanna]

Oh yes, I think every joule thief needs a secondary (except the one that you make that is to be used as an actual thief of joules).

I had missed the last 2 videos, and I see what you are doing.
I made a comment on the last one for everyone as well as you.

So, the 3w is a single bulb?
The thing the chinese lights do all the time is they overdrive the leds.
This is less of a problem with a single but it kills a multiple led light pretty fast.

The single you have is fine.
I really cannot say how many turns you need on your toroid, but for starters make 8 turns but cut off enough wire for 20 turns and see.
Thing is, if you have too much spiky voltage the light will shine extra bright one or 2 times then die. I call it "pop", because it pops with NO sound.
If you kill a led with amps, the led will get orange bright and literally burn and smell bad.
Of course you don't want either, but you have less warning with the hi v pop.

So, just make a few and see how it goes.

jeanna

[unzapped]

It is a single LED. It is the standard one that comes with a LED mag lite flashlight.

Thanks! I will be playing this weekend...

[CosmicFarmer]

@unzapped
I dont know how you have the insides of that white battery but I think you might need to retool it if you want the really good stuff. What I would suggest is you make the oscillator and toroid all together, with a light on the inside (through a view panel like a looking glass to see if oscillations are still present), and you attach the secondary's high voltage lead to the outside of the battery shell.

This way you are able to light the standard one two or three led load no problem, or you can take it out and slam it in something that lights 50 - 100 ... The light on the inside is removable for more output on secondary volts, but is useful for troubleshooting or just lookin' at it!

Hm come to think of it you might have to modify the high tension line on the inside of the battery to have a AV plug and then make the polar ends on the outside.

Neat idea but you would want a toroid no bigger but no smaller then you can use for that pvc. A big one for high voltage but small enough to fit... See if you can get the machine to scramble wind!.....

Also if you can find a way to be able to tune a resistor while the thing is inside then you could tune the load to make sure your getting max performance.

All these changes make it more complex and is more expensive to make, but is worth it because of increased performance.

[unzapped]

@cosmic

I had a simple joulethief on the inside... just kinda mashed in there.. That 3 WATT LED crushes a standard JT.

I am recently testing a secondary winding with a different led flashlight... that this has been running since saturday evening! Thats a real energizer bunny!

I agree with your observations about tuning. I think the direction to take is to define the application of the technology... tune for the specific application, and create different products.

Like this one is for the 3watt mag light, this one is for a home emergency light and radio, this one is for a standard led light, etc...

What do you think about this approach?

Jason

[jeanna]

Hi Jason,
(I know, you didn't ask me...)
I agree with the modular approach, at least for now.

We are so accustomed to thinking that all appliances work best at 110v, we think we should be doing that now.

It is not true, and in fact, I was unable to repeat tesla's hairpin (my modification) with his light bulbs because he had light bulbs that worked at 50v and 100v. Where are those? All I can use is the 100v kind.

I think it is a smart thing to make a flashlight with 3 leds all running from one secondary. They can be parallel or in series...and if you push them less than their highest, you will have lots of light for the same (yes or less) as with the one you now have from the secondary.
Now, what you will get from this is a longer lasting flashlight (joule thief secondary) that does not need special tuning to keep it bright as the battery voltage goes down.

BTW, did you solve that surge/dip problem? I think some hot glue will help a lot, because it is so easy for this high voltage to arc even if the wires don't exactly touch. If not hot glue, then tape.
(I think the magnet is great, but expensive and may hurt the jt transistor in the end.)

So, IMO...
Keep going.
We are all different, and I really appreciate that you want to get it out there for others.

jeanna

[CosmicFarmer]

Just a note - something I learned - correct me if I am wrong...

but scramble wind reduces even capacitance and adds chaotic capacitance. You can never tell exactly what you have after your done scramble winding, in terms of capacitance, so as the oscillator sweeps frequencies, it nails multiple resonances and increases voltage, instead of just finding one. And knowing that to have highest volts in a resonant transformer, you need a large inductor and a small capacitor, so the smaller the capacitance you can have the better, and the MORE values, the better.

as of WHY the oscillator sweeps frequencies, I do not really know, but voltage is how fast it does it. Put in a dead battery and it sweeps really slowly, and you can hear it on an AM radio. A fresh battery might sweep too fast for you to hear.

But I may be completely wrong but this is what I think it is right now.

So do as Jeanna says and close your eyes to wind.

[sucahyo]

This is not joule thief experiment, but I am using my joule thief small toroid coil. With sting oscillator circuit small toroid produce 110V radiant, better than my 9V/240V transformer at 76V radiant.

YouTube - Comparing transformer with small torroid coil

I guess coil impedance matter for more output. But, this experiment do not compare efficiency.

[tjnlsn255]

Custom designed Toroid coils.....

Will they supply the core or do I have to ship my cores to them to be wound?

I want to know how much it costs for a soft ferrite core 3" OD x 1.75" ID x 1" thick wound bifilar with 18 guage and 22 guage magnet wire with 5 complete layers wrapped all around?

Thank you ..... is that the kind of info you are looking for?

Hopes and Dreams....

Tj

[ewizard]

Just a note on high power LED's like the 3 watt LED in the Maglite. These have been around for a number of years and the difference between a Luxeon or Cree high power LED and the common 5mm LED's I often see used in JT experiments is a huge difference. The 5mm LED's can run on 1 ma or even less. The newer high power LED's can easily consume 1000 ma or more (I've got one that will pull 2.8 Amps). And their brightness is hundreds to thousands of times more Lumen output than 5mm LED's. I've got a single LED that puts out 1000 Lumens and mine is by no means the brightest available. Your typical higher power 5mm LED puts out 3 to 10 Lumens. That 3 watt Maglite LED probably does around 80 to 120 Lumens. If you want to really get full brightness out of it I think the current draw needs to be considered. Most of these LED's can't take over about 4 volts straight to the LED but in the case of the Maglite I think there is a circuit in the LED holder to control the current and voltage for proper operation. If it's getting too much voltage from the JT that might make it flaky as mentioned in the video. Hope that helps some. I look forward to seeing what you can come up with on the toroid production.

[Allcanadian]

@ewizard

Just a note on high power LED's like the 3 watt LED in the Maglite. These have been around for a number of years and the difference between a Luxeon or Cree high power LED and the common 5mm LED's I often see used in JT experiments is a huge difference. The 5mm LED's can run on 1 ma or even less. The newer high power LED's can easily consume 1000 ma or more (I've got one that will pull 2.8 Amps). And their brightness is hundreds to thousands of times more Lumen output than 5mm LED's. I've got a single LED that puts out 1000 Lumens and mine is by no means the brightest available. Your typical higher power 5mm LED puts out 3 to 10 Lumens. That 3 watt Maglite LED probably does around 80 to 120 Lumens. If you want to really get full brightness out of it I think the current draw needs to be considered.

I would agree, I use a comparative test to determine the actual light production. I utilize a simple closed white box with a white paper diffuser a few inches from a solar cell. The white paper acts as a diffuser so intense beams from the LED(s) give a consistent reading. In many cases what appears to be more light from the LED's is actually less and in some cases a single LED will produce more light that 20. Basically we cannot and should not trust our eye's to tell us how much light is being produced. Another good indicator is to illuminate a dark room with the LED's, I have found in many cases that twenty LED's that appear to produce a great amount of light in fact produce very little, no more than a small candle in comparison. The real proof is when a circuit produces a "comparable" amount of light using less measurable energy, comparable meaning the light output is compared to a standard battery driven LED. I have been using 1 watt LED's off ebay which work well, I believe thay were $17 for 20 with free shipping -- straight out of China, LOL.
Regards
AC