Earlier last week, the oneTesla team launched a Kickstarter campaign to release their two newest products: tinyTesla and oneTeslaTS. In only three days the campaign has reached quadruple its goal and it continues to grow!

tinyTesla is a little Tesla coil that shoots sparks, plays MIDI tracks, and exercises your soldering skills. This coil kit is designed to be easy to build and assemble for anyone with basic soldering skills. Shooting lightning and playing music using electricity itself is an exciting way to learn about physics and electronics!

tinyTesla is a Solid-State Tesla Coil (SSTC), which has a non-resonant primary and a resonant secondary. Because the feedback loop locks on to the resonant frequency of the secondary, not the primary, tinyTesla is insensitive to its surroundings, allowing you to safely pull arcs off the coil with a metal object (pulling an arc with your finger will result in a nasty burn and is not recommended!).

In addition to the creation of tinyTesla, the team gathered feedback from hundreds of builders of our previous kit to determine what we could do better. With oneTeslaTS we've designed what we think is the ideal compact Tesla coil, with a focus on reliability, ease of assembly, portability, and usability.

oneTeslaTS is a Dual-Resonant Solid State Tesla Coil (DRSSTC), which uses a tuned primary circuit for improved performance. This design allows the coil to efficiently produce long sparks (nearly two feet!) using a compact driver and a minimum of power.

Learn more about these new products on our Kickstarter page and pick up your own tinyTesla or oneTeslaTS today! Get 'em soon, they're going quickly. :)

A majority of our coilers are pretty proficient with a soldering iron, but there are plenty of people who are interested in coils who don't yet have the technical expertise. Since oneTesla would like to spread the joy of learning electronics to everyone, we've decided to start a series of video tutorials!

Our first video is a soldering tutorial for beginners. It's geared towards anyone who have never used a soldering iron before but would like to learn. oneTesla's co-founder, Heidi, presents this simple how-to in five easy steps. If she can teach me how to solder then I'm confident that anyone can learn!

You can watch the tutorial below, as well as on our YouTube channel. Please like and subscribe if you'd like to see more videos, and feel free to leave comments as well! We're starting small with the hopes of adding more advanced tutorials in the future.

Those of us in the maker community know the importance and the power of collaboration. Without it, oneTesla simply wouldn't exist. The coiling community came together to fund our first kit, they collaborate on troubleshooting issues via our forum, and we make our schematics and manual open to the public for other coil enthusiasts to learn from. We know how science and technology can advance the world if we work together.

Next weekend, Code for America is asking for coders, developers, designers, and many more to collaborate with them during their National Day of Civic Hacking. Code for America aims to improve communities at the state and local level by bringing open-source applications to the government workforce. The National Day of Civic Hacking, which will take place on May 31st at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, will bring together the makers in their community to improve current civic applications and brainstorm new ones. The agenda for the day includes creating an application that maps public playgrounds and all their amenities so that families can plan their trips more easily.

If you are in the Arlington area from 8 am to 9 pm on May 31st, we highly encourage you to check out the National Day of Civic Hacking. And if not, see what you can give back to your community, whether it's through Code for America, a hobbyist internet forum, or otherwise. We can create some awesome things when we all work together.

 We're proud to be an open source hardware business now accepting Bitcoin!

It's exciting to be one of the limited number of businesses accepting payments in virtual currency. To pay using Bitcoin for a kit or components, just select the "Bitcoin" option under "Payment Methods" on the checkout page, and you'll be directed to Coinbase to complete the purchase.

New Website Features

What better way to spend the winter holiday than avoiding family obligations by being busy with website work? Nope, we can't think of a better way. So throughout Christmas and New Year's we worked on revamping our website. Take a look at a side-by-side comparison of our old and new sites:

Much improved, eh? All user accounts are still there, though old order information has not been imported.

Like us on Facebook!

Unfortunately, unconventional capitalization is restricted on Facebook pages: "oneTesla" was not a permitted page name, nor was "OneTesla" or "onetesla". After putting it off for a long time because there was no perfect page name, we finally settled on "One Tesla". Like our page here: http://facebook.com/onetesla 

As the summer goes on, our team is hard at work packaging kits. We've also been on the road!

July: Detroit Maker Faire

From July 26-28, a oneTesla delegation was at the Detroit Maker Faire. At our table, visitors could play on the Tesla coil using a keyboard. We won Make's Editor's Choice award!

August: MuseCon

From August 2-4, Bayley and Heidi were at MuseCon in Itasca, IL, running a build-your-own Tesla coil workshop! We had a coil on display outside the workshop room, and also ran a Tesla coil Q&A session. A highlight of the convention was a show of big musical Tesla coils by Masters of Lightning: Jeff Larson, Terry Blake and Todd Johnson. The guys are engineers from Fermilab and Motorola who build giant Tesla coils by night and put on shows in the Midwest several times per year. It was great meeting other seasoned coilers, and the neat demonstrations they did during the show give us ideas for what more we can do with oneTesla.

Coming up! September: New York City Maker Faire

From September 21-22, you will find the team at the New York Maker Faire. We will be selling a limited number of coils there immediately available at a discounted price, so come check us out! In our latest Kickstarter update, we described some of the things we learned from some manufacturing mishaps. Everything has now been sorted out and we’ve learned a whole lot from the experience. There’s good news about the metal toroids: after seven months of production delays, they are all arriving in early August! For those of you who have already received your kits, we will be sending additional toroids as soon as they become available. For orders shipping in August, the toroid will be included in the kit.

It's been over two months since the end of the Kickstarter. Thanks again to all our backers! Without you guys, oneTesla would not be what it is today. We posted a few updates about our recent progress on the Kickstarter page.

In the meantime, we've been busy sourcing parts, while trying not to get swamped by schoolwork. We've had an interesting experience ordering parts by the thousands. Some of the packages have been wonderful to open (such as the dozens of freshly-wound secondaries); others, not so great (such as the surprisingly heavy boxes of one thousand power cords). We've also had some head-scratching moments, like when one of our suppliers sent us a hundred thousand 0402 2.61K 1% chip resistors instead of the thousand fiber transmitters we ordered.

Why hello there, 2000 meters of fiber cable (and Heidi)

On the technical side of things, we've been putting the final touches on the main driver board (mostly silkscreen changes), and testing the international (220V) version of the board. We've also been adding more feature support to the interrupter; the current version supports sustain, pitch bend, and velocity control, making the coil much more playable on keyboards. The interrupter hardware has been changed significantly - there are now frequency and pulsewidth knobs, to allow for classic fixed-frequency operation as well as MIDI operation.

The latest interrupter revision. Don't worry, the final revision will have a black board.

If you're waiting for kits to come back in stock, expect to wait until the beginning of summer. We'll be busy fulfilling the first 600 Kickstarter orders until then - our last round of Kickstarter kits should ship out at the end of May. Until then, add your names to the waiting list, and stay tuned for more updates!

Thanks, !

This is crazy! We launched a Kickstarter campaign to get a critical round of pre-orders and also get a bit of publicity, but we expected to have trouble generating serious interest. We reached our $20K goal on day 2, and now (the start of day 4) we've got 230% of that. And we thought we'd be lucky to reach the goal by the end of the 27-day campaign.

It's been interesting to watch where people find out about the campaign. Kickstarter lets you see your referrers in the back end, and about half have come from external sites. That means that half of our backers have found us through Kickstarter, so a whole lot of people must check the site regularly. One interesting referrer has been Mashable, which made a video about the project within only 15 hours of the launch. Another one is Synthtopia, an electronic music portal frequented by MIDI geeks. We were even contacted by a BBC podcaster, and the next day I was called up to do a brief interview for the show Outriders (the podcast should appear on New Year's day). We've gotten so many pledges that had to cap the number of coils we could deliver by February to 150, and we're only promising the next batch by March.

Here's a snapshot from the Kickstarter dashboard of the progress at this point:

Just for fun, I did a little gender analysis of our backers so far, based on usernames and pictures. A total of nine backers so far with women's names, three of which contributed because they know us personally and wanted wanted to be supportive. Unsurprisingly, but regrettably, I need to ask: female coilers, where are you?!

oneTesla was originally inspired by two things. Firstly, the existence of the FGH60N60SMD IGBT, which uses fairly novel field-stop technology and is significantly faster, cheaper, and bulkier than most other IGBT's on the market. Secondly, I was sick of the failure-prone nature of DRSSTC's - it wasn't bridge failures due to overcurrent that annoyed me, but rather sporadic failures such as loose wires, mechanical strain, and damage during transportation to demos.

The first iteration of oneTesla was designed and laid out over the course of three days in February, backed by copious amounts of bad pop music and caffeine. It used a BNC jack for interrupter input, FGH40N60SMDF IGBT's, a hand-wound current transformer, and couldn't play music.

The first (hand-etched) board wasn't tested until mid-April. Version 0.8 suffered from the disastrous problem of not having a high enough CT turns ratio. As soon as the primary current rang up high enough, the feedback CT would force tens of amps through the feedback resistor, burning it up.

Version 0.85 fixed this by sourcing a commercially available 300:1 CT from Triad Magnetics, and also replaced the 1/4W feedback resistor with a 5W wirewound resistor. This fixed the critical flaws of the prior revision, and resulted in a working Tesla coil. The old design paradigm was "efficiency first", which meant running very low duty cycles and pulsewidths, resulting in ~7" long sparks at about 50W into the coil.

Version 0.9 came next:

At this point, Kramnik re-designed the board to use an optocoupled interrupter, and etched a variant of the coil. This coil was used as a testbed for the development of the firmware that eventually became the oneTesla MIDI controller. At some point, we also realized that grounding the secondary to mains ground was actually more reliable than using a big foil counterpoise, and also significantly improved streamer performance. However, this revision was still somewhat noise-prone.

Shortly thereafter, the kinks in the MIDI code were finally ironed out, a low-pass filter was added at a key location, and the board was respun for commercial fabrication. The original idea was to send out for 50 boards from MyroPCB to take advantage of the price break, build a few coils, and peddle the rest on eBay in the form of simple kits to help recoup development costs.

At this point, I went on vacation to visit Heidi (who was interning at an accelerator in Germany). She pointed out that we would seem much more legit (and also be much more profitable) if we had a real web store and a good manual. Soon we had a nice website, and I wrote the first revision of the manual, which was done in LaTeX and looked like a math paper. Meanwhile, Kramnik added polyphony and figured out the limits of the driver design.

The manual was deemed stylistically unacceptable, so Heidi began re-writing it to read less like a technical paper and more like a manual. We also decided to scale up the operation and cater more towards the general "maker" community, as opposed to only experienced HV hobbyists. This turned into plans for a Kickstarter campaign (which is still in the works), and a massive and ongoing effort to streamline the supply chain, revamp the manual, improve safety, and simplify the assembly process. On the technical side of things, the board was respun with a few critical features (such as a fuse), the interrupter was improved, and we designed a nice acrylic case and primary supports for the coil.

So there you have it - the history of oneTesla. The design has come a long way from the day it was conceived; we've tripled our spark lengths and made the coil infinitely more reliable. It plays music, it's portable, it's consistent, and it even comes with a fancy lasercut case! At least internally, we can now go from zero to Tesla coil in a few hours. Hopefully, we can bring this simplicity and ease of assembly to you as well!

Welcome to our brand new site. Let's get this show on the road!