Post your other electrical/electronic projects...

Username123 said:
Yeah it's pretty cool! My dad mostly built telsa coils, but he also enjoyed tinkering with plasma tubes and globes. At one point he sold one to OMSI, which is the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. I will see if I can get him to do another video of it someday. It's not necessarily the safest toy 🤪
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This detail is almost cooler than DJ tesla itself. I'm guessing only a few of us on here are aware of omsi. Not only did I go there a ton growing up (og style by the zoo) but I used to be a behavioral/ mental health skills trainer with kids and one of my non profits had an agency wide deal meaning my id badge let me bring a few kids in there whenever i felt like it. It was awesome. Still had to pay for the submarine, planetarium and bodyworlds.

Also some considerable intoxication at the ol laser light shows in high school.
 
Mentaltossflycoon said:
This detail is almost cooler than DJ tesla itself. I'm guessing only a few of us on here are aware of omsi. Not only did I go there a ton growing up (og style by the zoo) but I used to be a behavioral/ mental health skills trainer with kids and one of my non profits had an agency wide deal meaning my id badge let me bring a few kids in there whenever i felt like it. It was awesome. Still had to pay for the submarine, planetarium and bodyworlds.

Also some considerable intoxication at the ol laser light shows in high school.
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I bet the kids liked that. There is a lot of stuff to do there. Thanks for sharing!
 
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vigilante398 said:
Did a fun project tonight and remembered this thread, so it's getting a bump.

We got our oldest daughter an electric scooter last fall and she loves the look and feel, and it's the perfect size for her, but she complained it felt slow. With one of my previous "fun dad" projects I discovered that most electric motors can be overvolted a bit to get additional speed at the expense of lifespan, so I figured if I overvolted it a little bit it should give her plenty of speed and the motor would probably die by the time she outgrew the scooter anyway. Pulled out the 2x 12V lead acid batteries and put in 4x 7.4V LiPo batteries. Enough juice to run the motor faster, but not enough to fry the control board.

Absolutely night and day difference. Way more get-up-and-go and a higher max speed, and that's with an adult on it. I'll have my daughter try it tomorrow, she weighs less than half what I do, so she's going to freaking fly. Next step is going to be wiring up the charge port so I can charge the batteries without taking apart the scooter, parts for that should be here wednesday.

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Ha! I use the same principal but in the opposite direction...

We have a pedestal fan in our bedroom which is so powerful that even on minimum power it's too fast and loud - trying to sleep with it running is challenging. I have a step-down transformer which converts our 240V into 120V so I can use amps and things direct from the US when I need to. Found that using it for the fan slows it down just the right amount for a good night's sleep.
 
Well since I did the battery swap on my daughter's scooter for increased speed, my other daughters felt left out. So last night I took apart the old power wheels truck and did some work on it as well. I had already modified it a bit to fit a motorcycle battery as the stock power wheels batteries were both expensive and garbage, but that was more for reliability than speed. I found some Ryobi 18V battery connectors for cheap on amazon so I put them in parallel in place of the 12V battery. 18V is as high as I want to go, I want more speed but I don't want the motor to fry immediately. With two batteries in parallel I can get a total of 13Ah which is plenty for nice long drives.

I also added a small panel-mount voltmeter to monitor the battery voltage, and I hacked apart a cheap mp3 boombox so the truck has a sound system now. I didn't want to deal with a separate rechargeable battery for the boombox, so I put in an L7805 and take power from the battery pack. It doesn't pull much current, so I can get away without a heatsink. The only controls I moved to the outside were power switch, skip button, and volume control. I still want to add a keyed power switch so I can limit its use when the kids are in trouble, but didn't get to it last night.

I was tired when I finished (spent way more time on this than I should have) so the pictures aren't great, but there you have it.

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