Wireless light bulbs with a Slayer exciter

slayer rocksWhile playing chiptunes, creating lightning, and illuminating fluorescent tubes with a homebrew Tesla coil is awesome, they’re not exactly the safest electrical devices around, and certainly aren’t easy or cheap to build. There’s another option open if you’d like to play with strong electromagnetic fields; it’s called the Slayer exciter and is simple enough to light a few fluorescent bulbs wirelessly off a pair of 9 Volt batteries.

The circuit for the Slayer exciter is extremely simple – just a single power transistor, a few diodes, and a couple of resistors. The real power for this build comes from the custom-wound transformer made from more than 100 feet of magnet wire. After plugging the driver circuit into the transformer’s primary winding and connecting a metal ball (in this case a wooden ball covered in aluminum foil), it’s possible to light up a four Watt fluorescent tube with a pair of 9 Volts.

You can check out a video of the Slayer exciter after the break.

17 thoughts on “Wireless light bulbs with a Slayer exciter

  1. It’s not obvious to me that is not the same as a tesla coil. Like a tesla coil it is nothing more than a high voltage high frequency transformer. Do you know a flyback transformer from a crt tv would do the same? The output from a flyback is about 25kv at 15khz.

    1. WARNING: flyback can injure badly or event kill. I don’t hold responsible for any injury or dead. Try it at you own risk.
      Remember, it’s not voltage that kill but current and a few mA thrue the heart is enough to kill. Nevertheless for those curious to try, here some advises:
      1) To disconnect the flyback from the CRT aquadag use a long shaft screwdriver, wrap a wire connected to ground to the shaft and hold the srewdriver by the handle. The aquadag can keep charge for a long while.
      2) Remove the high voltage diode at the output of flyback.
      3) connect the flyback output to the hollow metallic ball and open the tv set and your done.

    2. I would say that it’s similar, only in this case the ‘tank’ (driver) circuit frequency is defined by the cut-off created in the primary winding when the field collapses. I can’t remember exactly how the frequency is determined, but it’s mostly just a different mechanism here. The system is likely way off resonance here, since the tank and secondary+topload are not matched. If you were to control the frequency externally (ie. no free-run), you’d likely get better performance. ;)

  2. Resonance transformer that automatically adjusts too the self resonance frequency of the coil. Or LC-Oscillator where the gain in the loop is not 1 but hopefully bigger.
    The parisit capacity of the Coil builds the Capacity of LC-Oscillator.
    Capacitive currents flow out in the air and can couple to things in the environment. If there is something to couple too.
    The circuit is not closed any more -> Or if you want wireless electricity
    caculate self resonant frequency of a coil: http://www.extremeelectronics.co.uk/calcs/index.php?page=isol.php
    i would explain it this way.

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