Oops

No amount of “No dude I’m serious, I can do this!” will put that squiggle back beneath the surface of the PCB where it belongs. I once read that scraping along a rail to expose the underlying copper with the intent of soldering directly to it could be rather “hit or miss”. I’m thinking the miss part applies here fairly well.

I had nothing to do with this…

 

 

I am a very organized person, I would never store cables this way… I came home one day and bumped into Jesus as he was leaving my room. He said “I was bored so I went in there and touched everything, quite a few times”. You know, looking at it now, I think it’s easier to believe that I sat down and purposely tied every cable together in a monkey fist knot and began weaving additional cables throughout. Either way it doesn’t change the fact that buried in that nightmare is 1 cable I actually need right now.

That’s the only part I can see, it’s tucked way up in the middle and will most likely stay there for eternity.

No good can come of this.

I made a Jacob’s Ladder powered by a neon sign transformer. Why? I wanted a quick and dirty project with a high “oooh ahhh” result.

Instead I burned up hours of my life trying to bend two pieces of wire just right for about 5 minutes worth of “heh, badass” quickly followed by “wow that took way too long…”.

The upshot here are the important lessons learned regarding the fantastically high voltage (10-15 thousand volts) produced by this transformer:

1. You only have to touch 1 of the 2 electrodes and it will shock you.
2. You so much as think about looking directly at this thing and it will shock you.
3. Say the word “insulation” to a high voltage device like this and it will laugh at you, and then shock you.
4. Connecting 1 of the electrodes to my doorknob and waiting for someone to enter without knocking was actually the best result of this experiment.

First post and whatever this is.

This is a “lamp” I guess. It was born out of necessity as I am constantly in need of a decent light source that doesn’t throw a bunch of harsh shadows on whatever I’m working (hah) with.

That blue thing sticking out of the top is a standard VGA cable; yeah, this thing used to be an LCD display.
 
I spent a good 3 hours trying to hack together some kind of simple driver circuit for the lights, but in the end I said to hell with that and resorted to hooking it up to my laptop to keep the damn thing lit…Windows 7 believes I have a 2nd monitor over to the right of my desktop. In reality, it’s nothing more than a giant black hole to lose my mouse pointer in. Still, best work light I’ve ever had.