I've already test-fired a bit. My sheds heat it up (solar) and vent air through it, it dries quick. I'll make it.
I made an un-un trifilar broadband xfrmr to attempt to match the 6x6kd6 amp to the fusor series tuned circuit which is medium Q, depending on how many ions (impedance into the series tuned section goes up with more gas). I used a real big type 66 toroid core supposedly meant for a 1kw balun. Maybe it won't fry right away (I used #18 teflon coated silver wire, which will probably arc or burn short of full power, but...gotta have something to try).
Just doing the canary thing here. This guy has some fun stuff (esp with guest singers)...this one's maybe not his best, but I just saw it, so.
Geeks for the win:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTQyFzTl5GA
Life, The Universe, and Everything
Forum rules
Here, you can discuss anything (well, anything legal and not offensive) you want to. Use this for gassing about any half-baked theories, general getting to know one another, and other things that as someone once said, should be forgotten after awhile. This sub forum is set to auto-remove threads that haven't been posted on for a couple weeks, emptied like the office trash can. Almost anything goes here, the idea being to keep the other forums and threads more on topic but in a maximally friendly way. If anything actually worthwhile should wind up here, let me know and I will make it immune from being removed.
Here, you can discuss anything (well, anything legal and not offensive) you want to. Use this for gassing about any half-baked theories, general getting to know one another, and other things that as someone once said, should be forgotten after awhile. This sub forum is set to auto-remove threads that haven't been posted on for a couple weeks, emptied like the office trash can. Almost anything goes here, the idea being to keep the other forums and threads more on topic but in a maximally friendly way. If anything actually worthwhile should wind up here, let me know and I will make it immune from being removed.
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Doug Coulter » Sat Sep 22, 2018 8:07 pm
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
-
Doug Coulter - Posts: 3515
- Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
- Location: Floyd county, VA, USA
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Donovan Ready » Mon Sep 24, 2018 5:09 pm
Well, we had an encounter with high voltage a couple of nights ago. There were thunderstorms, and then there was the storm that settled over us in the wee hours. More than 3 inches of rain in less than 4 hours.
I can sleep through some things and just notice them while I sleep, but oh boy, howdy! I didn't know I could still jump from lying sideways in the bed, but I made it about two feet up before I was awake.
Lightning struck not 600 feet away with a crack that's about ten times louder than a 105mm howitzer at the same distance, and much more authority. It fried every piece of electronics in the house down the hill: My cable modem, the wifi repeater and their (choke) AT&T POS 2-wire router.
The house downhill was almost washed away by the flooding. It's normally 30 yards from the creek, but it came up to their back porch, tore out the skirting and moved a burn pile so far that they don't have to burn it..
Back online, obviously, with a better router, and no foolish wifi. Yay! The ISP's tech didn't want to crawl in the muck under their house, so we moved the service up here, where I did the electrical work. Much better and twice as fast.
I can sleep through some things and just notice them while I sleep, but oh boy, howdy! I didn't know I could still jump from lying sideways in the bed, but I made it about two feet up before I was awake.
Lightning struck not 600 feet away with a crack that's about ten times louder than a 105mm howitzer at the same distance, and much more authority. It fried every piece of electronics in the house down the hill: My cable modem, the wifi repeater and their (choke) AT&T POS 2-wire router.
The house downhill was almost washed away by the flooding. It's normally 30 yards from the creek, but it came up to their back porch, tore out the skirting and moved a burn pile so far that they don't have to burn it..
Back online, obviously, with a better router, and no foolish wifi. Yay! The ISP's tech didn't want to crawl in the muck under their house, so we moved the service up here, where I did the electrical work. Much better and twice as fast.
- Donovan Ready
- Posts: 239
- Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2014 1:22 pm
- Location: Austin, Texas
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Doug Coulter » Wed Oct 24, 2018 10:17 am
We've had exciting weather now and again here too. My favorite was a lightning strike on one of the lightning rods I have over my solar arrays, which was around 6' horizontally from where I was sitting (on the outside of the wall, of course) - working on a server. What was fascinating about it was that while everything in the room went "click" and jumped a little from the huge H field, there was no bang for ~ 100ms or so - directly under the bolt evidently is a dead zone! So what I heard was the first echos from the surrounding hills. And FWIW, nothing fried at all. No real antennas to the sensitive stuff - even the phone/DSL wire is buried for miles and only a little comes out of the ground to go to the modem/router. My AC power of course is all very short wires from the inverter sitting next to the batteries in their own shed at the ground...
To top it off...I have a loop of copper pipe running all the way around both floors of my shop at ceiling height, grounded too - it's my compressed air system, so it acts like a big shorted turn...a LF faraday cage I guess.
Back when I fixed consumer electronic gear...I saw a lot of burnt stuff...I took pains when I built that place to avoid as much of it as I could. Having a high peak current arc in the fusor setup is now the big risk, and it can get to 100 kiloamps easy with the high-Q incidental capacities involved.
This is a fairly big deal for me, I finally got the shop its own pi to monitor the rain barrel. Now I can remotely see if there's water in it, and roughly the quality of it.
If it's there but cloudy - I can send it to the clothes washing setup. If good, to the cistern in my crawl space for later use in the living space...which now has a nice reverse osmosis system for potable water too.
The rain barrel size is an interesting engineering compromise. Any decent rain I get a heck of a lot more than that 60 gallons or so. But! I don't want water standing in there, as sun + crud = algae and that's a problem for using the water for much of anything, also clogging things up. If there's any pollen (my main pollutant these days) becuase of season and lack of rain for awhile, I want overflow to happen to float it out of there before using any, and may have to let the remaining water stand for a day or so to let whatever will settle do that. Too small a rain barrel and I don't collect enough water and have to go fetch it with a barrel and the truck and pump from some nearby creek. Too big and it never removes the floaters via overflow. I have a coarse screen on the top to keep out small animals, rocks, leaves, and a finer filter on the outlet, as well as having the outlet not quite at the bottom, so stuff that sinks has a place to go. Then further filtering in the cistern later, followed by the osmosis system for drinking and cooking.
But one thing I never had was a way to see what was going on there without showing up in person. You'd not think that was a big deal, but...it is. Because of the small size of the barrel, often it's raining like hell and overflowing, and I want to check that it IS overflowing and the water is good enough to let into the maybe-low cistern, so as to not waste rain barrel capacity with extra overflow...and then it's dark and it's raining, not a fun time to jump up and go look (often late at night too).
So I put a camera on the thing, looking down into it, and made a submersible light fixture to make bright white light at the bottom of the barrel. That way I can see if the water is cloudy or not, and how much there is, no matter what, from the couch. Not shown in this pic are some other weather sensors - the usual temp, humidity, barometer, inside and out, as it's easy and good to have another at that building - where I live, the difference between temp and humidity can be large in a short distance - one building is at the forest edge, shaded, the other out high and dry on the plain...so it's nice to get a couple readings - and I assume I can use the multiple barometers to check one another (they can be flakey).
Not much to see in this screenshot taken this AM but here it is. The wire coming in from the right is for the lights at the bottom.
To top it off...I have a loop of copper pipe running all the way around both floors of my shop at ceiling height, grounded too - it's my compressed air system, so it acts like a big shorted turn...a LF faraday cage I guess.
Back when I fixed consumer electronic gear...I saw a lot of burnt stuff...I took pains when I built that place to avoid as much of it as I could. Having a high peak current arc in the fusor setup is now the big risk, and it can get to 100 kiloamps easy with the high-Q incidental capacities involved.
This is a fairly big deal for me, I finally got the shop its own pi to monitor the rain barrel. Now I can remotely see if there's water in it, and roughly the quality of it.
If it's there but cloudy - I can send it to the clothes washing setup. If good, to the cistern in my crawl space for later use in the living space...which now has a nice reverse osmosis system for potable water too.
The rain barrel size is an interesting engineering compromise. Any decent rain I get a heck of a lot more than that 60 gallons or so. But! I don't want water standing in there, as sun + crud = algae and that's a problem for using the water for much of anything, also clogging things up. If there's any pollen (my main pollutant these days) becuase of season and lack of rain for awhile, I want overflow to happen to float it out of there before using any, and may have to let the remaining water stand for a day or so to let whatever will settle do that. Too small a rain barrel and I don't collect enough water and have to go fetch it with a barrel and the truck and pump from some nearby creek. Too big and it never removes the floaters via overflow. I have a coarse screen on the top to keep out small animals, rocks, leaves, and a finer filter on the outlet, as well as having the outlet not quite at the bottom, so stuff that sinks has a place to go. Then further filtering in the cistern later, followed by the osmosis system for drinking and cooking.
But one thing I never had was a way to see what was going on there without showing up in person. You'd not think that was a big deal, but...it is. Because of the small size of the barrel, often it's raining like hell and overflowing, and I want to check that it IS overflowing and the water is good enough to let into the maybe-low cistern, so as to not waste rain barrel capacity with extra overflow...and then it's dark and it's raining, not a fun time to jump up and go look (often late at night too).
So I put a camera on the thing, looking down into it, and made a submersible light fixture to make bright white light at the bottom of the barrel. That way I can see if the water is cloudy or not, and how much there is, no matter what, from the couch. Not shown in this pic are some other weather sensors - the usual temp, humidity, barometer, inside and out, as it's easy and good to have another at that building - where I live, the difference between temp and humidity can be large in a short distance - one building is at the forest edge, shaded, the other out high and dry on the plain...so it's nice to get a couple readings - and I assume I can use the multiple barometers to check one another (they can be flakey).
Not much to see in this screenshot taken this AM but here it is. The wire coming in from the right is for the lights at the bottom.
- About 10" of water in there now. Funny looking crud at the bottom - water is very clear.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
-
Doug Coulter - Posts: 3515
- Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
- Location: Floyd county, VA, USA
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Donovan Ready » Wed Oct 24, 2018 8:22 pm
I'm laughing, but not because you said anything really funny. I'd like to see some lightning rods in different barrels: One with distilled water, and several others with different salts..
I wonder if its our hard water here that transmitted the spike to the house down the hill.. Lightening is funny..
Still hanging in, anyhow.
D
I wonder if its our hard water here that transmitted the spike to the house down the hill.. Lightening is funny..
Still hanging in, anyhow.
D
- Donovan Ready
- Posts: 239
- Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2014 1:22 pm
- Location: Austin, Texas
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Doug Coulter » Thu Nov 15, 2018 9:08 am
Keep hangin man. Same here.
I got some emails this morning about the new Chinese fusion reactor breathlessly reporting they'd reached 100 million degrees. Which is indeed hot - and that they managed it for 10 seconds, which isn't all that long. Temperatures aren't the hard part for tokomaks, by the way (at least according to other tokomak workers)...it just makes for good press....
I think the conversion is ignorant and often misused. The velocity vector of the average particle is measured and converted to eV. Then a factor renders a temperature equivalent, which is only equivalent in the case of equi-partition of energy, no spin possible, and the mean velocity (these are usually true in a tenuous gas, however). As to collisions....random isn't mostly head on - which is rare, and head on is what makes fusion in 2 body interactions.
By this site, which probably is the same math they used: https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-co ... lt-kelvin/
It works out to 100000000 kelvin = 8617.328149741 electron-volt
Or under 1/5 of the applied potential on my fusor. Now, for a bunch of reasons we're not getting that on the ions, most of the time, which is what I'm working on now. It's closer to a mean of
5kev or thereabouts as I measured here from transit times.
But it's not directly comparable. We are head-on, doubling the number, effectively. We are not dividing our energy into 3 or 6 degrees of freedom (depends on whether rotation is one of the degrees, presumably not with hydrogen isotopes and ions...mostly. I'd bet there's a rotational moment involving the not-bound electrons that nevertheless aren't completely separate).
Sigh, any minute now, we'll have it...
Ice storms here are about the worst we get - we sometimes get a few feet of snow, and it can take some days for the state to find a place to put it (you can't just plow in a cut between two mountains, you have to haul the stuff away). But that's not that bad, you just stay home awhile. A serious ice storm drops trees on you and the road, and even makes your yard nearly impassable on foot - glare ice is the kind of water I'd bet even $deity couldn't walk on - we don't have a nice flat rink. I've seen a person go to the bottom of a hill - >1/4 mile, trying to cross the street to the mailbox in front of my house. And it took over an hour to climb back up in the roadside brush on all fours - the road was simply not even possible to crawl on.
I got some emails this morning about the new Chinese fusion reactor breathlessly reporting they'd reached 100 million degrees. Which is indeed hot - and that they managed it for 10 seconds, which isn't all that long. Temperatures aren't the hard part for tokomaks, by the way (at least according to other tokomak workers)...it just makes for good press....
I think the conversion is ignorant and often misused. The velocity vector of the average particle is measured and converted to eV. Then a factor renders a temperature equivalent, which is only equivalent in the case of equi-partition of energy, no spin possible, and the mean velocity (these are usually true in a tenuous gas, however). As to collisions....random isn't mostly head on - which is rare, and head on is what makes fusion in 2 body interactions.
By this site, which probably is the same math they used: https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-co ... lt-kelvin/
It works out to 100000000 kelvin = 8617.328149741 electron-volt
Or under 1/5 of the applied potential on my fusor. Now, for a bunch of reasons we're not getting that on the ions, most of the time, which is what I'm working on now. It's closer to a mean of
5kev or thereabouts as I measured here from transit times.
But it's not directly comparable. We are head-on, doubling the number, effectively. We are not dividing our energy into 3 or 6 degrees of freedom (depends on whether rotation is one of the degrees, presumably not with hydrogen isotopes and ions...mostly. I'd bet there's a rotational moment involving the not-bound electrons that nevertheless aren't completely separate).
Sigh, any minute now, we'll have it...
- Scary weather of the day. Supposed to quit soon, though.
Ice storms here are about the worst we get - we sometimes get a few feet of snow, and it can take some days for the state to find a place to put it (you can't just plow in a cut between two mountains, you have to haul the stuff away). But that's not that bad, you just stay home awhile. A serious ice storm drops trees on you and the road, and even makes your yard nearly impassable on foot - glare ice is the kind of water I'd bet even $deity couldn't walk on - we don't have a nice flat rink. I've seen a person go to the bottom of a hill - >1/4 mile, trying to cross the street to the mailbox in front of my house. And it took over an hour to climb back up in the roadside brush on all fours - the road was simply not even possible to crawl on.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
-
Doug Coulter - Posts: 3515
- Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
- Location: Floyd county, VA, USA
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Donovan Ready » Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:11 pm
Yeah. Try that in a '72 VW Beetle, crossing route 7 in northern Virginia on a sheet of black ice, lazily making 360's while watching the oncoming driver's eyes get bigger and bigger.
Obviously I died in the horrific crash...
Obviously I died in the horrific crash...
- Donovan Ready
- Posts: 239
- Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2014 1:22 pm
- Location: Austin, Texas
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Doug Coulter » Fri Nov 16, 2018 12:03 pm
So, that was you I managed to miss...You're talking about the road I lived on just outside town of Vienna..before I got smart and moved here...
I did a 360 once on rt 81 while moving here, in a station wagon, fully loaded. I even saw the ice under a bridge where the sun hadn't melted it yet, figured I'd just push in the clutch and coast on through since I wasn't doing any gees at all, and it wasn't all that many car lengths long anyway.
Nope..
Glad I had toilet paper in the load....
I did a 360 once on rt 81 while moving here, in a station wagon, fully loaded. I even saw the ice under a bridge where the sun hadn't melted it yet, figured I'd just push in the clutch and coast on through since I wasn't doing any gees at all, and it wasn't all that many car lengths long anyway.
Nope..
Glad I had toilet paper in the load....
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
-
Doug Coulter - Posts: 3515
- Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
- Location: Floyd county, VA, USA
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Donovan Ready » Sun Nov 18, 2018 1:13 am
My puckerer was tighter those days... Remember the term "scared shitless"? 
- Donovan Ready
- Posts: 239
- Joined: Thu Apr 17, 2014 1:22 pm
- Location: Austin, Texas
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Doug Coulter » Wed Nov 21, 2018 9:30 am
Sigh.....if it's not one thing....
**************************************************************
IPOWER Invoice
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Billing name: Douglas L. Coulter
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DATE: 11/20/2018
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AMOUNT DUE: 466.20
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- Customers may be required to pay US Sales Tax, Value Added Tax (VAT)
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In order to be exempt from such taxes, please complete the
"Account User Information" form located in your Control Panel to enter
any applicable US Sales Tax, VAT or GST tax exemption or reseller
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**************************************************************
IPOWER Invoice
IPOWER, 10 Corporate Dr., Burlington, MA 01803
****************************************************************
User's name: Doug Coulter
Billing name: Douglas L. Coulter
************************
Floyd, VA 24091 USA
DATE: 11/20/2018
****************************************************************
PAYMENT NO.: 121043707
ITEM: IPowerPro Hosting Plan
AMOUNT DUE: 466.20
DATE DUE: 12/20/2018
****************************************************************
Please Note:
- This invoice constitutes a payment notice for the
product/service mentioned above only. Other payments or services
are invoiced separately. Information on all products and
services for your account, as well as payment receipt
information, is also available at:
http://www.ipower.com/controlpanel/Bill ... ******.bml
- Customers may be required to pay US Sales Tax, Value Added Tax (VAT)
or Goods & Services Tax (GST) in the jurisdiction the customer is located in.
In order to be exempt from such taxes, please complete the
"Account User Information" form located in your Control Panel to enter
any applicable US Sales Tax, VAT or GST tax exemption or reseller
information.
Posting as just me, not as the forum owner. Everything I say is "in my opinion" and YMMV -- which should go for everyone without saying.
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Doug Coulter - Posts: 3515
- Joined: Wed Jul 14, 2010 7:05 pm
- Location: Floyd county, VA, USA
Re: Life, The Universe, and Everything
by Bob Reite » Wed Nov 21, 2018 11:54 pm
You renting a dedicated piece of hardware somewhere?
The more reactive the materials, the more spectacular the failures.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
The testing isn't over until the prototype is destroyed.
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Bob Reite - Posts: 142
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