inportb

A railgun needs a pretty beefy power supply that’s able to dump loads of current across the rails. Trying to keep costs low, I decided to borrow the charging circuit of a disposable camera. I removed the capacitor, xenon flash lamp, and a bunch of nonessential parts. Then I soldered on some switches, resoldered the indicator LED onto longer wires, and added alligator clips that will lead to the capacitor bank. Obviously, the capacitors are also to come from disposable cameras.

Here’re some pictures.

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The fun thing about Wordpress is that it’s easy to install and easier to upgrade.

When I upgraded to version 2.3.2, however, there was a pretty annoying issue with every single page redirecting to itself. It turned out that this was a feature, not a bug. I deployed the one-line plugin and the infinite loops stopped. This needs to be fixed someday…

I received an absolutely refreshing bottle of perfume today (thanks, dearest), which inspired me to Google for perfumes and stuff.  Interestingly, this turned up in the results:

Fun, eh? I wonder what Google for Men smells like…[via TecnoCHICA]

Happy New Year, all! And in the spirit of starting the year with a bang…

I felt like having some fun, so I started designing a tiny railgun. A tiny, kid-safe railgun. Eh, who am I kidding?

Anyhow, I imagine a small power supply based on the charging circuit in a disposable flash camera and a capacitor bank made from capacitors found in more disposable flash cameras. The rails would be short copper bars — somewhere in the range of three inches long, positioned about a millimeter apart. They’d be secured in a glass and plexiglas barrel using cheap clamps, and connected to the circuit using alligator clips. Unfortunately, there won’t be a real high voltage switch until I find something like an SCR rated for high currents; instead, I’ll just make do with a spark gap trigger.

What about the projectile? Ha. What projectile? The power supply should be able to dump 330V of high direct current across the rails for a split second. I imagine there to be just enough oomph to vaporize/ionize a tiny piece of aluminum foil and sling the plasma a couple of feet. Not bad for a baby model, eh?

The power supply’s pretty much done; now I just need to get me some copper bars and really thick copper wire…