Prolific maker Stephen Hobley has an interesting idea for protecting your wall-powered projects from self-destructing: add a lightbulb in series with them. The lightbulb acts like a current-limiting resistor, preventing your device from drawing more power than it can handle.
Note that this is not the same thing as using a fuse (which you should also do). The lightbulb hack works by restricting the maximum amount of current a device can draw, while a fuse cuts off the flow of power if it becomes too great.
4 thoughts on “How to keep your inventions from blowing up”
Comments are closed.
This is an old, but great, trick that goes at least as far back as the days when people still repaired TVs. It’s also common to use in combination with a variac, which lets you bring up a device slowly.
This is one of the many things I’ve used this for since building it: http://www.instructables.com/id/Old-World-Light-Bulb-Load/
I usually use it together with this: http://caladan.nanosoft.ca/c4/hardware/powerbox.php
Ooh, those are cool! Thanks for sharing!