Motion Sensitive Tesla Coil

This year I decided to make my garage into a little haunted house. To add some fun and serious scary points, I wrote some code and hooked up one of my Tesla coils to a motion sensor through my Arduino. It now turns on whenever someone walks by, and it's actually very startling.

Step 1 Materials

For this, you will need the following things:

• A Tesla coil - $20 - $50
• An Arduino - $35
• A Maxbotix sonar sensor - $25
• One 12V to 120V relay - Free to $6
• One transistor and a resistor to match the relay - Free from old electronics (See this Instrucable for more info.)
• 12V Sealed lead acid battery - Don't you have one already?
• Various wire

Overall, the total price comes out to about $100, but I had everything except for the sonar sensor.

Comments

[finfan7]

Couldn't you set the coil to always be on as long as it has power and then power it through one of those motion detecting security lights?

[robotguy4]

Hmmmm...

Wouldn't the arduino board be shocked?  Perhaps putting it in a Faraday Cage would be a good idea...

[DevCoder]

my coil only gives off about 1ft sparks

[robotguy4]

Ah, so I'm guessing that you put the board more than 1ft away from the coil...  That works!

[cool]

Nice Kitty! And nice project, a little odd for a haunted house, but cool anyway!

[guyfrom7up]

pssssttt enter this in the arduino contest

[DevCoder]

i have, it's pending approval...