AndresR145

Hello my friend and thanks for your kind comments. I really appreciate your plans on doing researches on the variations of earths electric field in thunderstorm. This is a startling project and really of the kind i wanted to fuel with my design! Now i come down to your questions.1) Every Motor will work that is supposed to run on a more or less constant speed. But even this requirement may be weak. I have the theory that, depending on the setup (disk size, charge collector capacitor, input current on OP-AMP) we need a minimum rpm of the motor but from a certain rpm on upwards there would be no influence of the collected charge anymore. But as long as this is theory just choose any motor with stabilized rpm you like.2) I first was very concerned about the quality of this capacitor and i...

Hello my friend and thanks for your kind comments. I really appreciate your plans on doing researches on the variations of earths electric field in thunderstorm. This is a startling project and really of the kind i wanted to fuel with my design! Now i come down to your questions.1) Every Motor will work that is supposed to run on a more or less constant speed. But even this requirement may be weak. I have the theory that, depending on the setup (disk size, charge collector capacitor, input current on OP-AMP) we need a minimum rpm of the motor but from a certain rpm on upwards there would be no influence of the collected charge anymore. But as long as this is theory just choose any motor with stabilized rpm you like.2) I first was very concerned about the quality of this capacitor and i thought it must have as less leakage current as reasonably possible. This was due to my experiences with electrostatic machines where you tediously and carefully have to collect charge carriers in a leyden jar until you gain enough of them to realize a fulminant discharge. Those setups don't forgive you the slightest design flaws that yield into leakage current. Now, here in this design my experience is that this is not that dramatic. We don't reach high voltages and this is where the leakages become nasty. So i would say you could use any capacitor apart from electrolytic ones. We have a steady stream of incoming energized charges and we always have some unavoidable leakage anyway. At least the OP-AMP swallows some nanoamperes.3) Generally there is no tolerance and you can make it the size you want. You just have to obey two simple rules. The smaller the capacitor is the faster it will charge-up but the "averaging" effect for interference and the the discharge from leakage currents will have more and more impact on the signal. Think of the capacitor as a part of a lowpass. The higher you make it the more your signal becomes a steady DC. If it is too small the signal becomes noisy. This leads us directly ti the second rule. The bigger the capacitor is, the better becomes you signal quality but the time to charge the capacitor also increases. At some point perhaps you would need to increase the time between motor start and taking the value from the capacitor.4) I used this from amazon: https://www.amazon.de/gp/product/B009L9EWPU/ref=pp...But you also can try different materials. Sometimes electronic components are delivered in some kind of "electric foam" to protect the against ESD. Also the small bags where the components are wrapped-up are made of plastic that has a conductible surface. You can take everything that is smooth and a little conductive. A high impedance is nor problem because we are working with very tiny currents. But you should avoid using metal whiskers. I tried copper and steel and they where ruining the plates.

This is correct. In my experiments i made the assumption that the electric flux is vertically oriented and in fact i never observed horizontal field components giving me a signal. Of course the current design would be susceptible to field components with spatial orientations between horizontal and vertical principally. To be sure you'd need to enclose the sides with shields as you described. For our purposes, i don't think this is necessary but if you do you should take care to keep at least the same distance between those new shields and the disk as it is now between disk and the upper shield. Otherwise the voltage gain by the capacitor effect would be negatively affected.

This is simple. Use the command "setintervall <value>" to change the sample interval as you wish in seconds. E.g enter "setintervall 60" for setting the sample interval to 1 minute. The value can be between 10 and 3600.

Hello again! That really strange. May i ask what RTC-module you are using? Do you have the the CR2032 backup battery inserted in the RTC-module?

Hello! Sure, the RTC is an I2C coupled module available as the standard Arduino RTC shield. It runs on an DS3231 clock chip.

As always the most simple approach is the best one. Great work!

No, this is just an ordinary potentiometer to be trimmed with a screwdriver.

Ah ok, this is the potentiometer R5(22K).

A red and black element? You mean on one of the pictures, the video or are you refering the schematic?

Hi! Sorry but i don't know about what element you're talking about. Where is the black and red element you mentioned? Is it on one of the pictures, the schematic or the video?

An awesom and somehow crazy idea! I really love it. Good way to ruggedize your smartphone.

Thank you so much for your comments. I loved to fuel your imagination!

An incredible great work!

An excellent question! My first intention of using a stabilized rpm was that everything you do not understand properly has an impact on your setup. So i made it this way to be safe. Later i thought deeper about this issue. Generally the disk-segments are rendering a current flowing into the charge collecting capacitor. The faster you turn the disk the more current flows. On the site of the charge collector you have an unavoidable leakage current because your capacitor isn't ideal and the electronic amplifier always has some input current. So the first finding is that the current from the segment disks must be larger than the leakage current. You need a minimum rpm. The second question is what happens if we exceed this minimum rpm more or less? Obviously he charge collector will charge m...

An excellent question! My first intention of using a stabilized rpm was that everything you do not understand properly has an impact on your setup. So i made it this way to be safe. Later i thought deeper about this issue. Generally the disk-segments are rendering a current flowing into the charge collecting capacitor. The faster you turn the disk the more current flows. On the site of the charge collector you have an unavoidable leakage current because your capacitor isn't ideal and the electronic amplifier always has some input current. So the first finding is that the current from the segment disks must be larger than the leakage current. You need a minimum rpm. The second question is what happens if we exceed this minimum rpm more or less? Obviously he charge collector will charge more or less quickly but up to what limit? Well, the upper limit is specified by the fact that every disc segment is a capacitor by itself. It takes some charge and generates a field against ground. By dragging the segment away from the grounded plate the energy of this charge gets amplified resulting in a voltage. When the segment gets in contact with the charge collector it takes this charge up to it's voltage. That means the voltage on the charge collecting capacitor can't get higher than the voltage of the segment. The conclusion is that we need some minimum rpm. Above it an increase of the rpm only results in a faster charging of the charge collecting capacitor but it doesn't change it's end voltage. So far the theory, it's unproven yet.A calibration is generally necessary because actually we just have digits with no dimension. I'd have to put the device between two large metal plates and apply a voltage to it. So i could calculate the field strength and the field would be more or less homogeneous. Then i could take the digits and calculate the proper transformation factor.

Pretty nice idea!

It's 480 rpm!

Great idea, thanks!

Sorry! Yes I know the article on wikipedia and no, I don't drive or own a Delorean.

Thanks! I also made the FET charge detector. The problem with this device is that it still takes energy from the field. In my experience it was only needful to detect changes of electric flux but you could not measure a static electric field.

I'll check it and will tell you.

No, but i'm still looking for one on Ebay! :-)

Great! I was always looking for something like this. Fuels my ideas!

A really nice idea and remarkable craftsmanship.

What a great idea and realized very well under heavy time pressure. Excellent!

Thanks for your polite comment! I actually was not earlier but growing old teached me it's lessons

Thanks for your polite comment! I actually was not earlier but growing old teached me it's lessons😏

Due to my experiments there was only a near field where you could get a reasonable amount of energy. My setup was oscillating around 1.2Hz and i could illuminate a CFL up to a distance of about 30cm pretty good while the apparatus was drawing 1A@12V. Then i tested how far i could pick up the 1.2MHz with an AM pocket radio. The signal vanished around 150m distance from the coil. So i couldn't see any long distance effects.

Wow you really digged in deep into this matter! My respect! I just did a bit on tesla coils but regarding the resonance issue i realized a setup you might watch for a self resonating tesla device. But beware of getting too much expectations. It's not a huge spark and streamer thrower, just a small humble device. https://youtu.be/Gs7t5reHMSc

All this replies are correct but i must emphasize thet one argument is missing. A battery actually is not an RC-circuit. One has to consider the chemistry in the battery. Will the chemistry follow those quick PWM impulses or will they be more or less averaged out by it?

Nice and accurate instructable. Thank you.

Nice project and you made a really good and understandable documentation. Well done!

Simple and great!!

What a nice idea!

Thank you so much! My mechanical skills are pretty limited but i tried my best.

Thanks you like it!