More fun with plasma speakers

Music Technology

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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8 thoughts on “More fun with plasma speakers

  1. David S says:

    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.

    1. Gareth Branwyn says:

      @David
      Based on your post, I at least tracked down the original Instructable and added it to the post. Thanks for that!

  2. thebestjohn.wordpress.com says:

    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.

  3. k4gdw says:

    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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Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.

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