Here's a Tesla Coil I built a few weeks ago being controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini.
I programmed some music for a show with some belly dancers:
(The two rhythms are "maksum" and "malfuf"...)
I guess the next logical step is to get it to play "Super Mario Bros".
really funny
well done
Very nice. Are you intending to do a bit of a write-up?
fungus:
I guess the next logical step is to get it to play "Super Mario Bros".
Nope...
https://www.google.com/search?q=dueling+banjos
(Nice work!)
Awesome.
PLEASE write that up for us!!!
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
{
karma++
}
Nice!
+1 for a write-up - things like the precautions to keep interference and noise from the coil
from disrupting the Arduino itself would be useful in particular...
OK, so exactly what are you using as an interrupter?
Paul__B:
OK, so exactly what are you using as an interrupter?
The coil is built from a MicroBrute kit: http://www.easternvoltageresearch.com/drsstc_microbrute.html
It's a solid state device with huge transistors (350A current), no rotary spark gap or anything like that.
The PCB has an RCA input jack which takes 5V pulses of about 100us each (more than that and the fuse blows). Each pulse produces a single lightning bolt at the top of the coil (yes, it's that precise).
Make enough sparks, vary the frequency, you get music!
MarkT:
Nice!
things like the precautions to keep interference and noise from the coil
from disrupting the Arduino itself would be useful in particular...
At first I wanted to use a strike target for the sparks but you should forget that unless you have a big metal spike in the ground attached to the target. Without the ground spike it's just a huge EMP weapon that will crash/destroy every computing device in the area.
The strike target was a piece of wire in a vice. At one point I set the bench on fire because sneaky sparks were jumping from the vice down through the bench to the metal table leg (see pic).
Moral: Just send the sparks up into the air.
With the sparks going upwards there doesn't seem to be a massive amount of interference. The box the coil is standing on for the show is lined with tin foil as a precaution but the Arduino never had problems during the development. It was about 1.5m from the coil (the length of the RCA cable I was using).
As another precaution I fed the Arduino output through an optoisolator into a little PCB with a 5V battery and some resistors.
The program is pretty simple:
I used Timer2 output on pin 11 to generate individual pulses (which have to be very precisely timed).
Timer1 generates interrupts to play the tone (Timer2 pulses are started in the Timer1 interrupt handler).
After that? All you need is some music.
