Electronics #

This page is about my first great passion, electrical engineering.

It starts with an introduction to how I got into high-voltage engineering.

I was interested in the subject from an early age, and at the nearby Fachhochschule I met an engineer who, together with a professor, gave “old-school” demonstration lectures on topics like electric charge, lightning strikes, Tesla currents and the history of electricity.

Inspired and fascinated by the spectacular experiments, I – at first rather clumsily – set about replicating what I had seen. That was 2005. The equipment naturally developed over the years; you learn best from your mistakes, as the saying goes.

In time this produced several Tesla transformers, along with the accessories and support gear: a 20A control desk and a small impulse-voltage generator. All of the equipment was designed and built with the aim of being portable and presentable. At the same time, the outward appearance alone should put to rest any doubt about the operational safety of the apparatus, so everything was built to be mechanically and electrically solid.

Next comes computer tinkering.

In order to take automated measurements in the gradually-growing electronics and high-voltage lab – and, among other things, to control the lighting in the “party cellar” – I built a series of expansions for the PC. For example, following a circuit from a magazine, I built a board that, connected to the PC’s parallel port and driven from QBasic, switches eight reed relays and so can be used e.g. to multiplex measurement channels.

Using an AD7874 I built a circuit to monitor our broken heating control. The A/D converter was driven by a Turbo C program through a 71055 PC card, and the measurement data was written to a text file for later analysis.

Computers other than PCs caught my interest too: among them the SGI workstations, the Motorola 68000 family (which I got to know through the compact “cube” Macs and the Atari ST), the transputers in the form of AVM ISDN devices, and the HD63484, of which I managed to grab a few tubes at a hobbyists’ meet. The AVR microcontrollers and, more recently, the ARM controllers also piqued my interest. Of course, last in the chain you also need programmers to get the various memories and controllers programmed; here I have recently come into possession of a c’t EPROP, which (one day, with new software) will presumably solve all my problems in this department, and on the side can also program and read out GALs.

These activities did not go unnoticed, and so it came about that I ran an electronics club at my Gymnasium for a good two years, getting 5th- and 6th-graders excited about electronics. After the death of the aforementioned professor, I also got involved at the Fachhochschule to keep the demonstration lectures I had so often heard alive. As a result I have by now given the lecture “Faszination Elektrotechnik” four times – a public demonstration of the most important experiments from the Physics II university course; an alternative title for it would be “From Amber to the Electromagnetic Wave”.