For years, we’ve been watching (Jay powers) deliver high pressure to the ground on his plasma channel YouTube. From the spark gap made of copper pipe fragments to the car ignition coil driven by a solid 555 timer, he has a real trick to make his products affordable and accessible. But occasionally you will go out of your comfort zone. Although this dedicated diy’er can still copy the solid-state “pancake” Tesla coil he recorded in the latest video, we think this one is best left to professionals.
The story began about nine months ago, when [Jay] worked with YouTube [labcoatz] to design the PCB of solid-state Tesla coil (SSTC). SSTC uses insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) triggered by oscillator instead of traditional spark gap, which is not only more efficient, but also allows fine control of the primary coil. The idea is to develop a compact and easy to maintain AC power supply coil, which can be controlled by only a few dials on the front panel. The device will also utilize an antenna feedback system that will pick up the resonant frequency of the secondary coil and automatically adjust the IGBT Driver to match.
Since it is much more complex than many previous versions on plasma channel, it will take some time to solve all problems. In fact, most of the videos are [Jay] to guide the audience to understand the various failure modes he encountered when developing SSTC. Even for a person with high-pressure experience, there are many headscarves to solve.
For example, the first version of the design used metal bolts to connect the primary and secondary coils until he realized that this would lead to capacitive coupling and replaced it with acrylic blocks. If his previous video surprised you and showed how easy high-pressure experiments are, this is a reminder that it’s not always that simple.
But in the end (Jay) did solve all the problems, and the results were amazing. Even at low power levels, it will emit some impressive sparks, but when it reaches its maximum, it will provide some of the most impressive visual effects we have seen on plasma channel so far. It’s a lot of work, but it’s definitely not in vain.