Gareth Edwards of Edinburgh Hacklab and Dorkbot Alba in Scotland is our latest international visiting hacker. He dropped by the Dallas Makerspace on Sunday (7 Nov) to check out our newly painted warehouse area and help us pull the plastic tarps off all our gear. Edinburgh Hacklab and Dorkbot have done projects similar to some of our own including a really cool computer controlled pipe organ that puts our puny vacuum reed organ to shame. They’ve also worked on several high voltage projects, which came in handy Tuesday night (9 Nov) when Gareth helped us diagnose a problem with the voltage doubler for our Jacob’s Ladder. Everyone had fun talking about hackerspace stuff and we also had an interesting discussion about American, Irish, and Scottish whisky (or whiskey if you prefer). Gareth prefers Glenfiddich in case you’re wondering.
5 Comments
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It was Gareth’s brilliant idea to use a Variac to knock down the high voltage transformer’s output to a range that could be visualized on the oscilloscope.
Embarrassingly, I think all of us in attendance (that’s me hovering with hands on knees) now know what the waveform of a voltage doubler looks like when it’s been installed backwards.
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Fun times in Dallas. Steve, Tom says that current, not voltage, is the key to your Jacob’s Ladder…
Thanks to everyone for welcoming me to the space and I look forward to seeing one of you guys in the Edinburgh Hacklab one day.
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