Bigger is Better

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Bigger is Better

Postby clarksbrother » Sun Jan 12, 2014 2:01 pm

If you guys ever decide to do a larger kit...count me in...just sayin...
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby Alex » Sun Jan 12, 2014 9:25 pm

the thing is… would anyone buy a $1000 + kit? or at least enough people?

It's possible, imagine a onetesla with one of these on the board…
http://www.glyn.com/data/glyn/media/doc/CM300DU-24F.pdf

though these bricks like like running at <100kHz, so the coil will have to be about 2-3 feet tall at least
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby Bayley » Mon Jan 13, 2014 1:42 am

Loneoceans has a brick coil that measures a little over a foot tall and can do 5' on a good day, so it is definitely within the scope of a kit.
The problem is, as Alex said, market - oneTesla, though extremely cheap compared to its competition given its feature set (out-of-the-box complete and ready to go, metal toroid, MIDI capabilities), is still on the upper end of pricing as far as hobby kits go. A $1000 kit represents a significant investment, especially for something as temperamental as a DRSSTC (even with OCD IGBT failures are not unheard of).
Now, that's not to say we won't produce a larger DRSSTC someday, but it may or may not be geared towards the amateur community...

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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby clarksbrother » Mon Jan 13, 2014 12:31 pm

Well, just as the proof was in the proverbial pudding with your first Kickstarter...it might be advantageous to take the same route again. I know...easy for me to say...I know there is an INORDINATE amount of work that goes into producing something like the oneTesla let alone a larger one... That being said, I think you'd be surprised how many people would pony up the big $$$ required to do a larger unit...
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby Speedy78 » Mon Jan 13, 2014 3:19 pm

Make one in comparison to EVRs Plasmasonic. Though thats a 2G unit.
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby ican » Mon Jan 13, 2014 4:08 pm

Just to be clear... In recent testing, we have determined that the OneTesla driver board is quite capable of pushing a larger coil, depending on the size of IGBT, secondary and primary you use... We hooked up a set of 80N65 (and diodes since they don't have them) IGBTs as well as a Half Bridge brick (don't know the part number) and made some nifty sparks. The 60N65s we have in the kit are capable of pushing 13" streamers into the air, about 20-22" max to ground without excessive tuning, and we are seriously overdriving them to the point that it's amazing they don't blow up more often.

The 80N65s we used were able to push a vertical streamer to 20", and horizontal streamers to 25" to ground... and we weren't even straining them... They also run without any external cooling fans, just a heatsink. The secondary was a 3 1/2" x 12" x 36AWG, and we had a 5 turn 7" primary with that setup.

The half-bridge brick we used, we were driving as an SSTC on a modified oneTesla board (removed the tank capacitor, added an antenna, and added an MMC) and were able to draw 3" arcs to ground at about 30VAC... We didn't want to push that one too hard, because it was severely out of tune, but the fact that you can use the oneTesla driver board for so many different things is pretty cool.

By the way... we also powered a flyback transformer with the oneTesla driver, and got 2" arcs. =)

I think the limits of the board are the IGBTs... so if you put something massive on there, and add capacitors, you should be good to go.
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby Bayley » Mon Jan 13, 2014 6:02 pm

The next step up (this might go into production someday) is native OCD on the driver and a full bridge - I've gotten 3' out of 60N65's in a full-bridge configuration before using a secondary similar to ican's. And ican is right - you can throw pretty much any IGBT into the driver, match it to an appropriate tank cap, secondary, and primary, and get longer sparks; we don't officially support it because validating different combinations of IGBT's, secondaries, and primaries is time-consuming, but in theory it's easy.
I'm also not sure the niche that Plasmasonic fulfills is one worth competing in; EVR markets the kit as a production-grade coil, but safely installing a DRSSTC in a production environment and managing EMI and grounding is not something anyone (or indeed, any technician) can do; for something like that you really want to fly a company engineer out to the site to help with installation.
However, there is something to be said about having a high-performance flagship product, as it reflects positively on the rest of the product line and is good for publicity, even if it is a low-volume product.
In other words, we're highly undecided about scaling up - however, I can say that scaling down is something we are actively working on right now.
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby bomber315 » Tue Mar 11, 2014 2:36 pm

alright its been 2 months... tell us more about this scaling down you speak of :)
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Re: Bigger is Better

Postby Speedy78 » Wed Mar 12, 2014 9:49 am

As awesome as large coils are there's something even more amazing about small ones!
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