Plasma Speaker
Contents |
History
Inspire
About 2 years ago, during the summer of 2009 (in Ed's basement, where StudentRND was being held), we watched a lot of videos on YouTube. Looking for ideas. One of our favorite cool things to look at but didn't think about really making it ourselves at the time was the arc speakers. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from huge Tesla coils to two small nails hammered into a piece of wood. The latter was known specifically as a plasma speaker, and some enterprising members of the organization decided they wanted to build one. After ordering the parts and trying to work out the schematic, they ended up giving up. I tried as well, and failed -- almost setting something on fire with no other interesting results.
Fast-forward 2 years, and we suddenly remembered about the plasma speaker project. It was up to me, Marshall Meng, and Matt Chapman, now, to build it. With the experience I had gathered over the previous couple of years messing around at StudentRND, I no longer felt intimidated by the project. Indeed, I was excited and couldn't wait to get started. Not only did we get started, we managed to churn out a working product.
Create
The plasma speaker is a device that creates an electric arc of about 20,000 volts using a MOSFET switching power through a transformer with a 40 kHz square wave. Sound from an input source is amplified and added on top of the carrier wave, making the arc play sounds that we can hear.
In other words, it's a miniature lightning bolt generator that plays music by controlling the lightning's "hotness" and thereby changing the volume of the thunder. It doesn't produce the highest quality sound but the result looks very cool (the plasma is a very hot purple stream of pure electricity!).
WIth this project we also tried a new fundraising platform, trying to sell our creation as kits on the internet to fund future products and infrastructure.
Learn
I probably haven't ever had more to do with circuits than this year at StudentRND. It was the whole experience from the very beginning, from inception to schematic design to circuit design, testing, and beyond. Not only did I familiarize myself more with engineering problems, I also learned about more practical things like sourcing components, dealing with coworkers, and managing large scale product delivery. It was the whole package, and it couldn't have happened in a classroom. I feel like I learned more during a month in the summer at StudentRND than everything I learned the previous year of high school.
Kits
- Assembled w/ cable: 40
- Assembled w/o cable: 31
- Full Kit w/ cable: 42
- Boxed: 30
- Full Kit w/o cable: 41+6
- Boxed: 42, Shipped: 32 (-10 accidental)
- No PSU: 53-6
- Boxed: 50, Shipped: 23
- No Flyback: 7
- Circuit board only: 5
