techno guy

Impressive :P

I saw your video about the small water battery that was powering a clock as a demonstration of this type of battery.Very interesting, I may have to order some magnesium rods and play around with this ;)

As far as I know, no.From what I've heard, the Pi is wired to read the SD card first, then you can have it do whatever from there.But if I'm wrong and you find a way, then please let us know. :)

I'm assuming you mean those standard pi cameras and you want to output the video through RCA. If so, then the answer is yes.Just connect the camera through the pi's camera port, connect a RCA display, run some software to grab an image from the camera and output it to screen.You could even write your own program to output the images using pygame and python.

Well, those measurements were taken in the most primitive way, so chances are that the real numbers are far worse.When I tested these circuits, the worst I got was an LED not lighting at all, the best I got was an LED lighting up for a second or two before draining the capacitors. Your mileage may vary.

Each of these circuits could be built in a few minutes if you have the parts on hand.It didn't cost me anything up-front because I had the parts on hand, but the price range is well below $100 if you have to buy everything.I think it should be feasible to make some or even all of these circuits in one month.Just remember that you probably won't be able to generate enough energy to do anything useful aside from winning (hopefully) a science fair :)

If you're talking about step 1, it's the ground pin, kind of like the baseline voltage pin.If you're talking about step 2, it's the micro USB plug to supply power to the Pi.

This instructable exists because not all of us have a TRRS to RCA adapter.There are cases in which it makes more sense to cobble one together and use it now than order one and wait 2 weeks to get it.

Is this exclusive to the Raspberry Pi, or is it in general?

I can't help you if you're using Windows, that's why the beginning has that little section about this being an Ubuntu thing.That's also why I apologized to the Windows people ahead of time :p

Sounds good, maybe I'll try it out with an external hard drive to see if I can replicate the results.Then I might add steps for that in this (or another) instructable.

If you followed this tutorial to a T and it still doesn't work, then I have no idea.Your drive is most likely an external hard drive with Debian, and this tutorial was for a flash drive with Raspbian. I don't know why that would make a difference, especially at the dd stage.If you are able to make it work, I would be interested to know.

Try it without -s 1400M in the pv section, also sync, disconnect and reconnect your drive and see if anything changes.

I had a little trouble understanding what you are asking. I think you're asking if it's possible to add a 0.9 to 12 volt transformer to increase the power output?If so, then in theory yes. In practice it probably won't work (at least not very good) because the power generated by these devices is so small that amplifying it would make the current even smaller (and less usable).

We could use some of these in the building I work in. :p

Depends on the input voltage/current/frequency.

Maybe 1 cm?

Technically no because it isn't near the resonant frequency of the flyback, but actually yes (more like kind of) because you'll still be able to draw sparks from it, just they will be smaller and less powerful.

It's possible, you should probably use some kind of diode for protection.I have actually burned 555 chips from shorting out the output of the flyback.

The simple driver runs at a relatively low frequency, probably under 100 Hz.It really depends on the size of your relay, bigger relays run slower than smaller relays.

In theory. If you try it, I would be interested to see what your results are.