Held late at work a bit, just a half hour over, then home, a light snack, and experimenting with the chladni drivers.
Tested the resistance of the coils I made this weekend at work, they vary from 0.5 to about 6.5 ohms. Made a few more coils today, too, playing around.
The amplifier puts out up to 100 volts! That's some POWERFUL big current, even at 70V RMS, through a tiny little coil. Seriously hot, like 300 degrees F hot.
I ganked a voice coil out of a "real" speaker and ran it at half volume for a while, and it got up to 140 degrees or so itself, even though it had mighty fine wire on an aluminum former.
I think I'll end up with a single layer (double tops) of very fine wire-wrap wire (30ga) on a copper pipe "nipple" (short length). This will dissipate enough heat, hopefully, to keep it all good. I may even add heat fins! Stylin'.
After that, a light dinner, shopping, and them home to bottle the two batches of ginger cider. Batch one was very dry, showing something like 0.970 on the hydrometer; batch two was less dry at 0.985 or so. Very nice, both of them, but the second was much tastier, and had a much bolder ginger ambiance.
Hope they carbonate! I'm dying to break into the cherry to see if it got fiz yet, but I'm waiting more.
Then, after all that, an hour or two about working on the Connect the Dots proposal... Silona is hitting pay dirt on this, it seems, and needs to float a more formal definition of the project out this Wednesday.
Damn. I got no time! I'll smack it around some during lunch tomorrow (and in dead moments at work, but it's been very very busy there lately so that may be small), and we are meeting at 4:30 after work to try to put it into shape. And Rob, too, I hear.
I'm dying to get resources on CtD; and my visit to Palo Alto only reinforced my belief in this project.
Wish us luck!
Posted by Edwin at February 18, 2008 11:05 PM