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Experiments with electricity

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Bensa said:
Whoah, just woke up a while ago. Lots of reponses, maybe its not a good thing:D
I have these 9 volt batteries used by the Swiss Army to power flashlights, and their meant to last a long time. I plugged a LED in and it was pretty bright, until it popped.
LOL in my physics classring an 'off day', we had a couple LEDs from an old circut board. Since we were so bored, we took one of our power supplies, and hooked it to the poor LED. We slowly cranked the voltage to 15V, watching the thing change colors and smoke all the way :cool:

We did that to eack LED one bt one until they were all smelly piles of silicon :D

JigPu
 
Just now, when I was removing the GPU from a burned-up GeForce 4, I couldn't get it to come off with my heatgun or soldering attachments for my minitorch. So, I removed the catalyst and let it be the bare flame... That turned the back of the PCB into a nice smoking mass, and the smoke was very smelly and black.. It made me almost pass out but I got my exhaust fan going in time... :D I got a nice NVidia keychain out of the deal though... :D
 
Ah the fun with electricity. We once made a telsa coil in school....during our exhibition of the project, my friend accidentaly touched it when it was turned on, and i was touching him so we both ended up with very tingly numbness for several hours.

You ever see those little soldering kits for learning the basics? Well on the Strength tester kit (you touch 2 fingers to metal terminal plates and can set between a strong or weak setting. Well I (accidentaly actually) used much weaker resistors than was called for. The weakest setting was a bit stronger than the strongest of my partners who built in correctly. The strongest setting on mine was strong enough to be really painfull in not prepared for it. We used to set mine on low then raise the power and see how long we could manage to hold on beofre the pain was too much.

This actually was the start of my toying with electro shock fun :D

Now fastforward 3 years to 1 year ago. Dog training collars = Fun. Take turns hooking them around friends necks or thighs and let the shocking begin. Drunk this is even more fun. Again competing for who can be shocked the longest is always great.

Fast forward again to couple months ago. We watched The Jack##$ movie and we watched the bit with the muscle stimulator with gleeful laughs. Wouldn't you know it the house we had the lan at thatt night just happened to have one of these things. We were all half drunk so we ended up spending about 2 hours shocking various parts of our bodies to numbness.


Now unintentional shocks i've gotten in plenty. Testing small engines (lawnmowers, My uber go-kart, snowblowers. ect. ect) for spark can be a quite shocking experience. Psu, Monitor, and Tv repair can be very painful. And the one incident where we shot model rockets with thin wires on them during a lightning storm well that was by far the coolest and stupidest thing we've ever done. (by the way lightning most definately can strike twice in the same spot)
 
JigPu said:

LOL in my physics classring an 'off day', we had a couple LEDs from an old circut board. Since we were so bored, we took one of our power supplies, and hooked it to the poor LED. We slowly cranked the voltage to 15V, watching the thing change colors and smoke all the way :cool:

We did that to eack LED one bt one until they were all smelly piles of silicon :D

JigPu

LOL physics class "off-days" brings back some pretty hilarious memories... like throwing all the desks out the window and sitting there in our desks under the trees. It was great. The teacher had no control over us whatsoever.
 
LED+12v = fun! It's more of a guessing game what they'll do - explode, smoke or just glow red hot!

Also, ever put car jumper cables on a battery and put a hacksaw blade between them? Glows red hot then melts. And leaves the paint on the garage floor on fire :D

Plus fun with transformers - I used to frequently overload AC wall adaptors and get about 10A out of them - useful for making pencil lead glow hehe

Smoking ICs is also fun - try connecting the output of an op-amp to the supply rails - I was wondering why the oscilloscope was displaying all those funny waveforms when the rising smoke distracted me.
 
Ahh, fun with electricity and physics... I once hooked a bunch of spare model rocket "C" size engines together and ignited them all (with redundant backup igniters, those things are just too unreliable... :rolleyes: ) It made a quite large amount of thrust, enough to lift the brick they were attached to about 20 feet in the air... :D

Also, a fully charged lawnmower starting battery, charged overnight with a high-amperage charger, can give huge amounts of power for something that size... I connected alligator clips across the terminals to see if my wires were good, and found myself holding an arc-welded insulated wire that instantly grew too hot to touch... It took it about 2 seconds to melt through, and that was 12-gauge wire.... :eek:
 
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