My tazers worked fine on the 12-volt wall-wart. But when I wired them to the 12-volt lead-acid battery.... sparks! Smoke! Broken.
I guess I needed that current-limiting resistor after all.
I have one functional tazer left, but I think I'll move to plan-B and build a high-voltage igniter some other way... from scratch, or maybe from a more durable (e.g. 12-volt) device. More research is needed.
Tomorrow, April 12th, I am doing a demo of my Ruben's Tube at the April DorkBot (7PM, Cafe Mundi@1704 east 5th)! Just one of the 4, to simplify setup. I did a test run last night at a friend's house, found a few wrinkles (the tazer burnout, forgot a power cord), but generally had success on a nearly-empty tank.
I'll do more tests tonight, and carefully bag up my cables and stuff so I'll have _everything_ tomorrow. I also need to note the more interesting frequencies on the signal generator, and test my new external mixer (feeding the signal generator into the Mac was not working well).
During last night's test, three of the four channels on the amplifier were working beautifully, but one was not giving me any signal. Then, after 5 or 10 minutes of operation, the dead channel came to life. Mysterious.
I'm going to buy some better cables today. I don't trust all of my cables.
Also, finished the article on the hot-glue web gun and sent the text to my editor (who still seems to be on vacation; come back Mark! I want feedback!).
Took Monday off to do homework... on the hard CS class; foolish me, took a "project" class; foolish me, chose an "interesting" project. Both translate into more work than I want to do.
Soon. Soon. Will be done soon.
Posted by Edwin at April 11, 2007 11:43 AM