Electric noob question(s)

[Cherryman]

Hi Slider,

Tnx for the heads up.

Yesterday I decided to make a joule thief and wrecked an old power supply for the parts. I did find a nice toroid wit dubble copper windings on it, find a 1k resistor and a Mosfet (IRFP460A).

I soldered it all together and as I needed an input power I uses the Garden Solar. The light went on butt i did not see any difference , so I unhooked it (I did not take measurement, maybe I had a good Ampdraw)

This circuit seems efficient now,but as you buy it, there is a El Cheapo rechargable battery in it and the original led was so dim, i sometimes had to find the right looking angle to see it even glow. Now with the extra battery things work much better, maybe it was at the edge of operating Voltage with just one AA.

So I analyzed the Solar thing and came to the conclusion it had to be a Joulethief of some kind. So in the beginning I coupled a Joulethief to a joulethief ;-) After removing that I started to do so measurements and Letsreplicate was kind enough to guide me over the first steps.

My goal is (besides "free" energy, as we all, and just some fun making things and trying things out) To get a small water-pump running on a solar panel. And a few (LED) lights as grow lamps for my indoor Aquaponics. I was think three 2x2 solar panel and 2x2 penlights should do the trick, remove the optical diode and hopefully it can run my waterpum (Just a tiny continues flow)

LED FLOODLIGHT / LED REFLEKTOR 10w 20W - YouTube

Does anyone know if these LED high power floodlights run can be hooked to a joulethief? I think i will get into the jouleringer, or flip flop stuff for higher wattages and voltages?

I have tons of ideas ;-) Anyone tested those inverter circuits with some more interesting stuff as Peltiers, or run a simple low friction Stirling to produce low cost heat or cold?

[LetsReplicate]

The inductor on your board (resistor looking jobby) is a 470uH.

Good call on it being an inductor, I had open a solar LED system before I noticed that the "resistor" was labeled on the board as L1. It seemed odd that it didn't have an inductor while I was drawing it up and it being an inductor makes perfect sense now.

The solar LED system I just opened was a multiple transistor arrangement instead of a single, 4 pin IC. Guess I'll head back to the store tomorrow and try to find something closer. What brand do you buy?

Thank you for joining the conversation. Any chance you'd be willing to explain double loopstick energy scavenging on Let's Replicate? You'd be given your own blog about it and likely an entire category for replications.

It is small cylinder shaped thing, with two pins. the positive pin arrives from the second coming from the transistor and according to the qx5252, the BAT connector. The other (the negative) is going to the capacitor and led out.
But is ok, i will test it and we know.

Yes, the black cylinder with the silver band pointing toward the capacitor: that is the diode that you labeled as reading 1N5804 in the picture. That diode is not a photo diode, it's a high speed silicon diode. It has a forward drop voltage of 800mV and prevents reverse current from reaching the BAT connector.

I don't know what will happen if you remove the diode, but if you're curious: take a wire and short it out. The worse case scenario of that is burning out your transistor.

How large is the water pump are you trying to run? There are some farmers near me that have to run generators to pump well water for cows. A small, homemade solar system would same them a few hundred dollars a year in fuel bills.

Yes those LEDs will light using a joule thief. But if they are designed to be plugged into mains power, you will probably need to produce at least that much voltage to make them light up. Watts are a deceptive measurement for LEDs. People usually think that watts are a unit of light output but watts are really a unit of heat dissipated (energy wasted) and have nothing to do with light production in anything but incandescent bulbs.

[Cherryman]

I will use a small water pump, only have to raise the water about 2 meters, continues flow, does not has to be a great amount of water. So i will search for a low voltage water pump, no problem. It could be interesting to see if a 220V water pump would work with one of the inverter circuits.

My Aquaponics trial setup

My setup would be to limited for cows drinking, I think there best option would be a small windmill with no electrical, jut a mechanical pump. Easy maintenance and repair.

Of course it could be done with solar, if it normally takes a generator, I guess you will need a few 100W panels. Or try the inverter way.

But as far I can see it now, the inverters, thiefs, flops, etc.. Al use switching instead of brutal power, I hope it is enough. I did see some promising results with lighting AND heating up basic light bulbs, so the power must be somewhere ;-)

I also wound this today (see thumbnail) I find those Tesla towers fascinating and I have a unconventional experiment planned for it.

At last: Fan still running, lights still lit.

Almost 17 hours now, Still remarkable as it is a 12V fan and 4 LED's

[Cherryman]

After around 18 hours the fan stopped, the lights are still on.

Voltage at connector 2.57 V
Voltage batteries 1.8 ( 2x AA 0,9V in serie)

I aborted the test here.

[Slider2732]

qx5252 ? I must be having a brain 'rear end emission', because 5252F is the designation on many of my 4 legged garden light chips too !
0916 is often written on them with or instead of that.
There's no datasheet it seems for them.
*runs off to look on Google again*
From here: Where can I but a JD1803 chip?
Tada! http://www.instructables.com/files/o...7KGRFNEHI2.pdf

It's good for 5.5V and 0.8A !

@LetsReplicate - the ones I have were from K-Mart, $2 each I think. Got about a dozen a few months ago and ripped the solar panels off. Those panels are either really good or awful. The tip when buying, is to look at the neatness of the cell lines. If all are straight you'll gain a healthy 2V and about 20mA, if scrunched up and skewed you'll be lucky to see 0.4V in direct sun.
They're Westinghouse ones, black base and round cap. Cheapo cheapo and I believe are the same as the gold topped Walmart ones, but that isn't confirmed.
I'm with Cherryman on the converting...the LDR controls on or off of the chip firing up the LED, but I want to pulse that input with an external feed, to give a flash rate.
The QX5252 has a Patented shutdown procedure to negate spurious LED flashes at low operating voltage, which, can be be useful indeed when pulsed instead of constantly running. Pulse the circuit at above around 25Hz and we get constant light (to our eyes) yet the input requirement will be lower. I know we start with a circuit that pulses anyway, so it addles the mind to think of a pulsing pulse circuit lol.
If the pulse stage can be a simple capacitor/resistor arrangement and based on the output firing that preceded it (hysteresis type of thing), then the resistor could be a pot and off we go
I do apologise though Cherryman, it would be rubbish for a water pump....unless the pump ran from a conversion of the output via NPN/PNP pair and as an AC motor perhaps.

The double loopstick method is best explained in a recent YouTube vid: Garden Light Charger results - YouTube
I have the circuit changes as diagrams etc in the vid.
At a week now, it's run the circuit and lit the red LED off the 2 swappable little 1.2V Ni-MH 120mAh cells and not even lost 0.1V between them. The power it did lose seems to have been when converting the circuit to pins and plugs to make swapping over easier (Bedini batteries style). I plugged the run battery in backwards for a few seconds Also, our dear wonderful sweet cat 'MiniMe' sent the circuit flying across the room one day, with a deft flick of a paw.
However, do note, there are no claims or anything with it, it is still losing some power while running.
The first loopstick is in place of the inductor. A ceramic cap and variable pot are in series with it, to control input current/LED brightness.
The second loopstick is carefully set up, sitting on top of the first to harvest the emitted field energy of the first. It has one pigtail end open, the other has an AV plug and that runs back to the run battery.
The setting up process is one of connecting a multimeter to the AV plug end and looking for sweet spots with best induction. Moving the ferrite piece inside it also helps to tune it up.
An AM radio (3rd loopstick really) demonstrates tuning quite readily, by reducing detected range of the running circuit. With the harvesting, the radio is affected down to about 1/5th distance. 2 or 3 inches compared to about 1ft distance.

Figures would help -
Start December 9th: 1.243, 1.223
Today at 04.30: 1.223, 1.182
Difference: 61mV

[Cherryman]

Hi Slider,


Just watched your vid, great!
It looks like your circuit is a little different, but i get the idea!
Adding potmeters/variables sounds good to. How do I identify a "small capicitor"? I see many different ones.. (I have collected a few chunks of old circuit boards)

I assume those green little containers are the 1.2V batteries.

I do have some questions, if you don't mind.

- Don't you have interference from the pulse with Amperage measuring?

- My Amp-draw reading was 6uA, and my voltage went down rapidly. So we assumed it was a false reading due to pulse interference. Do we measure different?

- How did you measure the amp draw?

- Where did you connect your MM leads?

- What is the AV plug? Audio Video jack? Google brings me many different plugs and cables.

I'm still chewing on the rest, (googling "loopstick" now ;-) and I'm working trough your post and vid step by step.

Tnx for making things more clear!

Peace.

[Cherryman]

Double post

[Slider2732]

Hey no problem. It all intrigues the heck outta me. Your experiments have given a little avenue to further my own stuff too, as well as hopefully help out if possible. The solar lights were bought for the parts and the circuit boards were actually just left in a heap on the table, til a week or so ago

That type of capacitor is a ceramic one, tiny orange round things on PCB's. They will normally be of 16V-25V rating and can be connected any way you like, instead of being polarised (only to be connected one way around). A 3 number system is used and written on them, that is quite easy to deal with, once accustomed to it. If the capacitor says 104, it's 0.1uF rated, 103, is a 0.01uF, 102 is a 0.001uF and 101 is a 0.0001uF. So the higher the end number, the bigger the capacity. The other 2 numbers work similarly, so a 474 would be 0.474uF. In most circuits around here you'll use a 104 or a 103, they are also about the most common on old junker PCB's. They're mostly used for a little ripple smoothing in power supplies or in radio frequency applications. Open up any radio from the 1990's and it'll be crawling with them
Oh and, you may see something like a '30' or '5' mentioned on a circuit. Find those by looking for a black splodgy line on the very top of the capacitor. All of those are really small indeed (physically and in capacity). The 30 means 30pF, 5 means 5pF (pico Farads).

Yeah, the green containers are 1.2V Ni-MH 120mAh cells. They come from little remote controlled cars. I bought half a dozen cars from a resales place about 2 years ago for about $1 each and those batteries were inside.
The two in the video are still running on the solar oscillator circuit and were in our utility room waiting to be charged up until this project. They give about 4 minutes of running the little cars and would take only 30 seconds to charge up using the toy controller...tiny capacity and why I used them.

I normally measure across a 1ohm resistor for this type of thing. The resistor goes in series with the circuit on the Negative rail.
This goes a bit over the top but explains more - Current Measurements: How-To Guide - Developer Zone - National Instruments
For most circuits though, the meter goes in series with the circuit as you did.

The AV plug is named after a Russian inventor, Stanislav Avramenko, who developed a 1 wire transmission system. It's really just half of a rectifier, or half of a 4 diode grouping used to change AC to DC. However, the uses we give to the 2 diodes are a lot of why his device is known by the two letters of his last name.
You take 2 diodes, put them side by side but turn them 180 degrees to each other. You then solder 1 of the end pairs together. That forms your AC input (usually at high frequencies from Tesla towers and such). The other end now has a diode one way as Positive and the other as Negative...to connect DC loads to, like motors or circuits. With an AV plug, a small capacitor across the diodes outputs sometimes helps, depending on what it's being used for. LED's when field testing the output of Tesla towers don't benefit much, but motors do because of the still rapidly changing polarity coming through.

[Cherryman]

Tnx !

Not getting it all, but having fun.

Just fried a circuit , did some voltage testing.

Result: 4 x 1,4V in series = fried circuit ;-)

I should known, as posted above somewhere they are rated 5V..

Anyway, continuing happily.

[Slider2732]

At the prices of these things it's good to discover the limits...even so, it's better when someone else does it !
The inductor will still be fine, not that that's much consolation in these matters.


Just an update on the 1.2V in and charging 1.2V out. It's still running along. Twice now though one of our cats has decided to take a look at the red LED, inquisitively knocking it from the dresser that it sits on. I discovered that shouting 'nooooo' at a cat serves to make them jump up and down on what it is you're trying to protect.
Voltages from 5 minutes ago: Run batt - 1.112, Charge batt - 1.190, swapped over every couple of days. 164mV used over 10 days.

Let us know what your next project is. I'm just finishing up a motor project and then will be back to these a bit more.

[kcarring]

@Slider2732

I just did a calculation. 764,234,712,345,587,234 solar LED circuits will effectively illuminate New York City, for free, 24/7. Ok, so... that's not an issue. But who will wind all the loopsticks? LOL

Just funnin'
Merry Christmas Bud!
Watchin as usual, good stuff you're doin

[Cherryman]

Hi Slider,

Your charging experiment looks good!

I ordered two of these:

220V 10W Floodlight, To see if I can get them to light on solar power, using one or more of those little garden toys.

At 16,- Euro a piece I'm curious to see what will be inside.


I think they house these : LED 10W |led 10w power|LED 10W-TaoYuan - $6.82 Rated at 10-11V 900MA So there must be some kind of transformer and LED driver in their as well.


Until they arrive I'm just getting more familiarized with electrical terms, measuring etc.

[evolvingape]

Hi Cherryman

Hi Cherryman,

I will offer my opinion on how I see Voltage and Current as Pressure and Mass Flow of a fluid, with the caveat that this is my opinion and is not the accepted scientific establishment view on the subject. I am not the first to have this opinion, and will not be the last!

So let's use a 12V car battery as an example...

A 12V car battery is 6off individual 2V cells wired in series to produce 12V.

At rest the battery will read about 12V ish when you take a voltage measurement. You cannot measure the Current potential inside the battery as current can only be measured when the electricity is “flowing” in a circuit.

The Voltage and Current are related by the formula:

Volts x Amps = Watts

So, in order to find the total “power” that the battery holds you must do what is called a load test, where you place a known voltage and current load on the battery and measure the time it can run that load for. You can then calculate how many Watt / hours of energy “were” in the battery.

You can recharge the battery but it will never return to exactly the same total energy that it was at before the load test. So it is not a great solution but is the only method known to measure Watt / hours capacity and check the condition of your battery.

I should also point out that running a battery this low on energy generally damages the battery and so you end up with a situation where you destroy the environment that you were trying to test.

Generally when a battery gets to 10.8V – 11V it is considered dead and unable to provide “useful power” and requires a recharge.

So lets talk about Voltage as Pressure...

So we have 6 individual cells in our battery at 2V each that sum to 12V, this is the electrical pressure potential of the system. When you want to charge the battery you “must exceed” the pressure potential in order to get any energy into the battery. In exactly the same way as you would charge a pneumatic pressure cylinder at a higher pressure than is already in the bottle. This is why a car alternator is rectified to DC at 14.4V to provide a higher pressure in order to force energy into the battery past the natural pressure potential threshold of 12V which is resisting. Think of it as a cracking pressure on a check, or non return valve.

Ok, so now what about Current as Mass Flow...

Well we know that current can only be measured when it is “flowing”, when a load is applied. So, if we take an example load of say 12 Volts and 10 Amps then 120 Watts will be flowing in the circuit. If we had tiny little wires on our battery then the energy the 12V voltage pressure is attempting to “push through” the little wires, at a rate of 10 units of current, will be too high for them to handle and resistance will create heat and the wires will burn out.

This is why you have huge thick battery cables on your car battery, because the starter motor attempting to turn the engine over draws huge current at 12V for a short period of time to get the energy it demands. This is why you will see a cranking amps rating on car batteries, which is different to an Amp/hour rating for leisure batteries.

So I tend to think of wires as pipes for a fluid, with big thick cables equal to a large bore and tiny little cables equal to a tiny little bore.

So a typical load like a motor will always demand a certain amount of Watts at a given speed. This as we have seen is a proportional relationship of Volts and Amps. The battery will always try to provide the current that the load is demanding. When it can no longer do so, at typically 10.8V – 11V the load will run down on reducing power and the battery can be considered dead in need of a recharge.

This is why it is completely ridiculous to suggest that voltage is an accurate indicator of battery charge status. If you think about it you can pressurise a massive water tank to say, 10psi, and also pressurise a little 1 litre water bottle to 10psi. If you release the pressurised fluid at the same mass flow rate from both containers, at the same time... which one will run out first ?

The little one obviously! But both had same “pressure potential”.

So this is why voltage is an indicator of the pressure potential the system is currently at but in no way at all tells you how much “fluid” is in the tank. You have to let it out of the tank and measure it to find that out!

Hope that helps generate some questions for you to ponder over Christmas

Rob

[Cherryman]

Hi E-Ape,

Tnx for your clear elaboration!

No questions up till now ; -)

[LetsReplicate]

I will offer my opinion on how I see Voltage and Current as Pressure and Mass Flow of a fluid, with the caveat that this is my opinion and is not the accepted scientific establishment view on the subject. I am not the first to have this opinion, and will not be the last!

Hi evolvingape,

Your opinion is correct, but you are not correct about the caveat: this is basic engineering. The mathematics for "engineering" between electricity, fluid dynamics, and mechanical systems are all the same, only the components and mediums are different. In electrical engineering it is very common to describe current as water flowing through pipes where voltage is water pressure and current is the actual movement of water in the pipe.

A battery is equivalent to a pressurized reservoir. You can't know how much is in the tank by it's pressure alone, and making it appear more pressurized does not necessarily mean it will provide more current.

^.^

I just did a calculation. 764,234,712,345,587,234 solar LED circuits will effectively illuminate New York City, for free, 24/7. Ok, so... that's not an issue. But who will wind all the loopsticks? LOL

Assuming a 2" square solar panel per circuit that would be 21,228,742,009,599,645 square feet of space required. Manhattan Island is 22.7 square miles, which is 632,839,680 square feet. So you'll need 33,545,213 Manhattan Islands covered in solar panels.

In fact, the entire United States, including water is: 3794083 square miles, which is 1.05772964(10^14) square feet. So it would ONLY take 200 times the US full of solar panels to power 1 city.