xenoxion said:
1. Right now the coil's about 7/8 of an inch long and 5 layers, and the screw barely goes a foot.
2. Is the shower of sparks + bang noise in my previous post normal, and if not how do I fix it?
3. Is there any way I can connect multiple camera units to create a larger power supply?
4. As I said before, I've got 5 330V 120uf caps. If I connect them in parallel, can I also add a 330V 80uf cap to those, or will it screw something up?
1. Increase that 5 layer coil to 10 layers. Go ahead and try 11 and 12 layers thereafter.
2. The shower of sparks is normal whenever you perform a slow manual
mechanical contact switch. Micro particals of metal will contact each
other first before the majority of the metal joins in. This very small area
rapidly heats and cause high resistance, which in turn causes heat and so
on. This is true even for low power battery discharges. The higher the
source energy of course the hight the BANG BANG spectacle.
3. Parallel charging: You connect power sources like any other output
by means of ORING. That means to attach a Diode to the output of each
power supply, then connect all the Diode outputs together. Anode to (+)
pin. This forms a higher current output withough the individual supplies
influencing one another.
4. At this low level in the game, the smaller 80uF paralleled with the (5)
120uF will not make any difference. If you do not OR the (5) caps to the
(1) cap, the caps will continually discharge into each other to creat an
average voltage. It is better to use (6) 120uF caps. The coil only sees a
TOTAL capacitance during discharge, so (1) 1000uF or (1000) 1 uF caps
is theoretically the same.