"white" LED and osc. current source question

Not to be left in the dust with all the white LED single AA cell experimenting going on here, I decide to have a go. Scavenged wire from the coil of an old speaker and wound some of it on the only toroid I could lay hands on, 0.75". Not having a proper xstr, I used the venerable 2N3904. Got oscillation right away, much to my amazement.

But the thing needs a proper transistor. Also, the magnet wire I used is

*tiny*. More like hair than wire. I have some 20# magnet wire, but only 50-60" of it I'd guess. Does that sound like enough?

I gotta get some proper white LEDs. The several cheapos I have are more blue than white.

experimenting

50-60"

Don't want to search for - much less buy - the perfect wire. I'm just puttering around here. Toroid and wire are "found stuff". Would like to use the 20# enameled, if the piece I have is long enough to give the needed inductance when wound on the .75" toroid.

Silver plated wire wrap wire ... interesting. I must have wrapped miles of wire in my technician days but never knew any of it was silver plated. Apparently some was, because several years ago, while canibalizing a digital clock I built back in 1973, I found all the wraps were black as coal!

experimenting

old

0.75".

right

50-60"

blue

I recently needed some 34awg magnet wire. I only needed a few feet of the stuff, but the place I got it from had a 10lb minimum. Let me tell you --- that's a LOT of 34awg wire!

Maybe I'll open a 34awg magnet wire store.

Bob

Maybe get into making a coilgun rifle? ;)

Now that would be a design challenge!

I read in sci.electronics.design that Mark Jones wrote (in ) about '"white" LED and osc. current source question', on Mon, 14 Mar 2005:

Running from a 1.5 V cell?

--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. 
The good news is that nothing is compulsory.

I faced a wire acquisition dilemma back in my college days. I had built a bench variable DC supply and needed several yards of heavy enameled wire to carefully wind (non-inductively, knock-on-wood) and put in series with the supply output, for current sensing. A prof. suggested a particular motor shop close to campus, so I went and asked how much they'd charge for some (wire size) wire. "How much do you need?" I thought, oh nuts! the guy expects me to buy miles of the stuff. When I told him I wanted only 10-15 feet he snorted, walked over to a spool and whipped off yards and yards for me. Even coiled and taped it for me. And he didn't charge a cent. I walked back to my apartment on a cloud.

And with a super-bright Power-On LED.

50-60"

I ripped the hair wire off my toroid and re-wound it with 21 turns of the 20# stuff. It works but of course it's impossible to compare operation of the two circuits now. I'm gonna take another look through mountains of "junk" and mebbe find a SWPS with a small toroid that I can rip out.

And I'm definitely gonna buy a Zetex low Vce xstr to play with. But first I'll check with photo shops in the area and ask for disposable cameras!

50-60"

puttering

wire

that doesn't necessarily mean it was silver though. I used to live in Rotorua NZ, a geothermal hot-spot. It plays absolute hell with electronics in general, and crimped connections in particular. Back when I was a videogame tech I used to have to re-wire entire cabinets after 2 years or so - the coloured PVC insulation all went a murky brown colour (just like the inside of PAs mouth) and the crimps corroded to hell. We had to scrape back the insulation just to tell what colour the damned wire was. We also soldered every crimped connection, to make it last longer. un-tinned Cu wire would disappear very rapidly.

Later on in life I helped service some AC motor controllers that had been in a fertiliser factory, and they were just as bad; most of the pcbs were written off - tracks gone completely etc. Here's another nasty gotcha with crimps - when using PVC insulation, if you heat it to about

70C it outgasses chlorine, which eats away at the crimp, making it get hotter and outgas more.....voila, positive feedback. It was a *huge* issue in a 400A motor controller (at least it was back when they were built with cables and crimped connections). Yay for X-linked polymer sheathed cables like Radox.

Cheers Terry

experimenting

of an old

on, 0.75".

oscillation right

used is

only 50-60"

more blue

the

operation

Those Zetex trannies *are* lovely, but meanwhile you can get a large improvement just using a heftier jellybean. The 2n2222a's Vce(sat) is much better than that 2n3904 you're using. MPSA06 and 2n4401 are others to consider.

As for disposable camera strobe, those transistors saturate, but gain is often (or at least was, a few years back) horrible.

James Arthur