More fun with plasma speakers

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By Gareth Branwyn
Posted 2010/07/09 @ 1:38 pm
Category Electronics, Music

We’ve covered plasma speakers before, and these vids don’t really add much in the way of additional info, they’re just different variations on the theme — a theme I find endlessly fascinating. The top vid is by way of TechEBlog, the second is from John Warren (via Adafuit). Check out his blog post below for more details on his set-up.

Update: Here’s the Instructable for the first speaker rig shown above. Thanks to reader David S for pointing us towards this.

The Plasma Speaker Saga pt.III

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4 Responses to More fun with plasma speakers

David S on July 9th, 2010 at 8:20 pm said:

I’m sorry if I missed it, but it appears people are leaving out their sources/citations. While we all love to share our work and have other people make it too, giving credit is important and knowing where the plans are coming from is awesome. Both items look like they are from the most popular instructable on the topic.

I may be mistaken here as well, but I thought the instructable had several key issues, heat dissipation on the mosfet being a major one. Has anyone expanded on or improved the project? I wish I had the knowledge and time to do so.

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- Gareth Branwyn on July 9th, 2010 at 9:48 pm said:
  
  @David
  Based on your post, I at least tracked down the original Instructable and added it to the post. Thanks for that!
  
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thebestjohn.wordpress.com on July 10th, 2010 at 3:40 pm said:

Hey John Warren here. You are correct sir. Instructables was my first forte into the plasma speaker. I wasn’t expecting it to be passed around so much as my blog is still quite small. Thank you for pointing out that I had forgotten to post a citation to the instructable in my post I am rectifying that immediately. I am currently working on a more stable version that will produce a much larger plasma arc, is on a PCB, and will not fry all my MOSFETs. So maybe I’ll be back in another post sometime.

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k4gdw on July 12th, 2010 at 7:07 am said:

I can’t help but wonder how much RF these devices throw out, especially the large Tesla coil based set ups like ArcAttack. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if an ArcAttack performance wipes out large segments of the RF spectrum for miles around.

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