SSTC

I kinda pulled an all nighter because I needed this done for outpost, and I made the entire driver, wound the coils, and just finished lol.

Time Spent: 18 Hours

I kinda pulled an all nighter because I needed this done for outpost, and I made the entire driver, wound the coils, and just finished lol.

Time Spent: 18 Hours

I made the 340VDC bus power supply and the 12V logic power supply.

I made the 340VDC bus power supply and the 12V logic power supply.

I started out designing the topload, secondary, and primary in Fusion.

I then made the enclosure and mounted electronics, etc. Did some polished and the CAD is finished!

Yes, I am advertising my engineering account on a tesla coil :)

Then I made the BOM which sucked. Since I can’t use aliexpress, I had to use amazon, digikey, and ebay which are all a pain to use compared to my dear aliexpress.

I’m gonna organize the repo now then submit

Time Spent: 4 Hours

I started out designing the topload, secondary, and primary in Fusion.

I then made the enclosure and mounted electronics, etc. Did some polished and the CAD is finished!

Yes, I am advertising my engineering account on a tesla coil :)

Then I made the BOM which sucked. Since I can’t use aliexpress, I had to use amazon, digikey, and ebay which are all a pain to use compared to my dear aliexpress.

I’m gonna organize the repo now then submit

Time Spent: 4 Hours

I did footprints and layout and a bit of routing.

So I wasn’t happy with my layout, mostly because I organized by components and not by circuits. So I grouped each circuit up first, and placed them together like blocks. And it came out way better and I think the routing will be nicer too.

I then did the routing and it turned out looking really good! I’m happy with this, so I’m now going to move on to the coil itself. Which hopefully won’t be too much of a pain but it is going to be a pain but it’s okay because it’s for Open Sauce.

I calculated the coil values with JavaTC. Which is a hard AF tool to learn considering there are zero resources on this on the internet. I figured it out though and came up with a decent coil.

Time Spent: 7 Hours

I made the schematic today. It’s inspired by LoneOceans, Steve Ward, and some other circuits. Making circuits like these and not just spamming chips like on a devboard is much much harder because you have to use actual logic.
Instead of just having function blocks and adding some decoupling caps to them, each component has a very specific purpose. Like the two clamping diodes on the antenna so that it doesn’t go further than 5V.
I started with the main power supply that provides 340VDC, 12VDC, and 5VDC. Which is the logic components and the main power.

After that, I did the common useful 555 interrupter. The original design used an ATMEGA, but using a microcontroller in Tesla coils doesn’t really seem like it provides much of an advantage. It’s sensitive, requires programming, and has no real advantage over a 555 other than music I guess>

Finally, I did the main driving circuit. It uses the interrupter to turn it on and off, feedback from the antenna, to drive the half bridge primary,

I then swapped out some stuff for terminals so that it’s all easily replaceable and the heavy components aren’t on the board itself.

Here’s what it looks like (now finished)

Time Spent: 4 Hours