There is an interesting tutorial for how to make 3V step-up circuit by using simple component from. The project is called Joule Thief. With this module, you can light up LED (it needs 3V) with single AAA battery (1.5V).
Instruction Link:
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/joulethief
Schematic for Joule Thief
Review
I have tried their tutorial, and it works wonderfully! Unfortunately I did not really take step-by-step pictures.. It is quite amazing that you can light LED with single AAA battery. I wonder how much current it can pull also.
Next step is to implement fabric embed-able version…. will be coming up soon.
7 Comments so far
This is really, really cool =D. Step-up seems to be a lot useful for battery powered projects. I am interested on it. Cheers!
Hi, i´mt trying to build one, but i´m new to electronics, what should I change to use 3V coin batteries joule thief instead of only 1.5??
Thanks for any help
Today is a great day for me. I have built one of these nifty devices. Now its on to build bigger and better things with all this “Free Energy” Concepts floating around. “Cheers to you my fellow human race!”
[…] Today, 01:06 PM I assumed everyone here would know the schematic.. but here it is, anyway http://www.kobakant.at/DIY/?p=172 I'm afraid I couldn't take a better quality picture. Damn camera. everything is pushed in properly, […]
Damen,
No such thing as free energy. You are stepping up the voltage at the cost of stepping down the amount of current. The joule thief just allows you to step up the output of a battery for longer by depleting it further into its depleted area, so it still registers as its nominal voltage output. Essentially, it lets you see a battery as “full” until it is 80% used up, rather than 25% used up (a normal dry cell puts out power at lower voltage until it is enough below its rated voltage to not be usable, even though it has 75% capacity left — this just steps up the output, letting you run it drier).
I realize my explanation may be a bit obtuse, let me explain by analogy. Think of the battery as being like an opaque bottle of cloudy liquid, like milk. Your battery-power appliance is a picky drinker, and doesn’t like milk that has been drunk down below the 3/4 line. The Joule thief is like a balloon in the bottom of the milk; as you pour milk out, you fill with air, so it looks like the bottle is almost full. This takes up a little bit of milk (you take a sip to have the energy to blow up the balloon). This is great, and keeps your picky kid-brother appliance thinking the bottle is fresh and almost full, until you burst the balloon and he sees it is actually only 20% left. Fewer mostly-filled-but-not-enough-for-picky-little-brother bottles are wasted.
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