Plasma Lamp, Part I
Looking through hackaday I found an interesting link to an Instructable, where a someone made a really cool looking steam-punk lamp out of a flicker bulb and the flash component from a disposable camera. I read through it and it looked super simple, so I decided to build a prototype lamp to see if I could get it to work, since it was instructions from the internet which arent always made by real people (trolls don't count as people to me, sorry).
- Disposable Camera
- Bulbs (regular don't work)
- Piece of wood
- zip ties
- Old timey throw switch (just cause I had one)
I decided to use a regular bulb at first, which failed, reasoning being that I wanted a purple glow, and most regular bulbs are full of argon, which should glow purple. My guess, since this was a build by numbers experiment, is that I am not getting a high enough voltage to excite the argon, and a flicker bulb will work better since it will be full of neon instead (feel free to email me if you know better, cause this is aperture science style research). Part 2 will come when I get a flicker bulb to play with.
The basics of this is to use the high voltage out of the camera flash, once striped of some parts, to drive excite the gas in the lamp. if you follow that link at the top, it describes what to pull off and where to add the wires to power the bulb. I basically followed that, then mounted it all on the stick of wood so I could hold it and poke at it. I tried both a single AA and a pair to power it, 1.5v and 3v respectively, and neither made the regular night light bulb glow. So this is a fail for now, until I get the other style bulbs. The wires in the images correlate to the tutorial on Instructables as such: 1 knot=+V in, 2 knots = +HV(400V+), no knots= ground/-, and the switch is rigged across the switch wires.
I'll make a new post when I get around to finding a flicker bulb, should be more around in Christmas time.