The best transformer I have ever seen :-)
Guenther Daubach
Posts: 1,321
Dear SXers,
first of all, a Happy New Year to all of you - have much fun and success with the SX in 2008!
Besides this, I could not resist attaching the picture of a real "high-tech" transformer I found in the Internet. Maybe, this makes you feel much more confident that you can build your own power supply from the scratch instead of using one of these mass-produced unreliable wall-wart types
.
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Greetings from Germany,
G
first of all, a Happy New Year to all of you - have much fun and success with the SX in 2008!
Besides this, I could not resist attaching the picture of a real "high-tech" transformer I found in the Internet. Maybe, this makes you feel much more confident that you can build your own power supply from the scratch instead of using one of these mass-produced unreliable wall-wart types
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Greetings from Germany,
G
921 x 691 - 318K
Comments
-Phil
Does it HUM ...
awesome picture ..
Happy New year Gunter.
Ron Nollet Melb OZ
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Paul,
I found the link to this picture in Wikipedia when retrieving some information about transformers, see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformer_types#100.25_homemade. There is the link to the picture www.zen40166.zen.co.uk/image006.jpg. There you also find the link to another picture www.zen40166.zen.co.uk/image005.jpg showing this device in use. Hadr to believe what you will see on this one!
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Greetings from Germany,
G
Ron,
I'm pretty sure that it hums. I would classify this not as a bug but as a feature because you can always thell when the transformer is powered
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Greetings from Germany,
G
-Kris
-Phil
he is not sitting in a pool of water..
the transformer is hopefully isolated ( not a auto-trafo)
his hands look like he has done it before..
amazing how he does not burn his hands to the bone...
Maybe this "Thing dropped out of the sky.. with a 1 page manual "
Anybody seen the movie "The Gods must be crazy " you'll know what I mean..
cheers ron
Post Edited (OzStamp) : 1/5/2008 2:25:56 AM GMT
"Stupid Hurts!".·
No welding mask·+ no welding gloves + home made welder = trip to an emergency room!
·
IMHO. YMMV.
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-Kris
I appreciate your comments very much because they address a very important aspect. It is really a shame that people around the world are still forced to work under such life-threatening conditions to make a minimum for their income. Using transformers like this is just one example. There are so many more - the list would almost be endless. I'm especially thinking of children-workers, and - even worse - childern soldiers!
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Greetings from Germany,
G
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
-Dan
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"A saint-like quantity of patience is a help, if this is unavailable, a salty vocabulary works nearly as well." - A. S. Weaver
-Phil
-Dan
"Says·Dan, who·welds with eyes closed, and·no mask and gloves when a quick·weld is all that's needed...·· ...and he knows better."·
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"A saint-like quantity of patience is a help, if this is unavailable, a salty vocabulary works nearly as well." - A. S. Weaver
·
I had a welding transformer a little better than that which is now doing good work in an African·welding shop near by. (I sold it as scrap but the scrap yard had other ideas)
·
Remember that we don’t live in the same world. You westerners and us people of the third world have a different set of standards and a different outlook on life.
·
We are more akin to your forbears of say 1880. Our life expectancy is 49 years Vs your approximately 78. Families are usually between four and eight children so you can afford to loose one (and you usually do). In the US, It was not uncommon for people to get killed in factory accidents in the 1880's, right through into the 1930’s. This is still true of our industries, particularly our coal mining and chemical refining (the state owned chemical company SASOL LTD kills a couple each month).
·
Its also not uncommon for a person to be missing a finger, toe, eye etc. Almost everyone I know has scars (but then Zulu tradition honours scars, even in women).
But there is hope…
I've just got back from riding a scrambler up the remote north bank of the Tugela River, from the mouth to about 120 miles inland. This is Africa at it's best and it's worst. (Not many people with white skins·round there so the kids insisted on stopping me. They'd only seen whites on TV. We buy your TV soaps like "Generations" and "The Bold & the Beautiful".)
Yes - there is TV in that beautiful grandiose rugged remote rural area of Kwa Zulu
When I broke down, I used my Cell Phone (Mobile Phone)·to phone the nearby towns until I found the part I needed·then caught a minibus (we call them taxis) to that town and back again. Not the sort of country·you would·want to mess your Hummer up in. Also you'll probably get stuck, skill plays a bigger part in off-road driving round here.
Yes - we have cell phones and also 3G, GPRS and Google Earth.
Trying to use the US/Eurocentric standards to measure the people of South Africa, Argentina or Indonesia is fraught with danger.· We are not dark skinned Americans/Germans/English/Japanese. We are Africans/Argentineans/Indonesians.
But what do we know anyway.·This is darkest Africa. it's called that because the electricity power stations are state owned and the politicians haven't planned to build new ones so we can't generate enough power to keep all the lights·burning at night. The solution is to turn off parts on the power grid each night and leave sections of the country in darkness.
Regards
John Bons
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http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/high-tech-trash/essick-photography.html
"In a poor suburb of New Delhi, India, where informal e-waste processing is a common household business, a man pours molten lead smelted from circuit boards. His family uses the same pots for cooking—a potentially deadly practice."
"A farmer in rural Taizhou, China, readies sweet potatoes for market beside circuit boards burned so metals could be extracted. The region has long been a major dump site for e-waste, but a crackdown by authorities has reduced illegal trade."
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Beau Schwabe (Parallax)) : 1/10/2008 4:27:28 PM GMT
Try not to impose skewed USA health and safety standards on the developing world.
I apologise for the comments below, I know this isn’t the forum for a political discussion… but please keep sending us your scrap, it provides much needed employment. This is my take on the situation.
South Africa will loose 400 000 people to AIDS this year… and there may be 20 deaths by lead poisoning – from all causes, scrap lead recovery included. (Scrap lead recovery probably keeps several thousand people from starvation!!!)
Where should South Africa (and the USA) focus our efforts, AIDS or scrap?
We, in South africa will have 10 000 deaths from Malaria this year (Down from 80 000 thanks to Bill Gates and all you guys buying Microsoft Products) and there are few recorded deaths in South Africa through PCBs (the poisons) and dioxin poisons.
Is it better for the 3rd World if you ban scrap recovery or is it better to keep quiet and just buy your new copy Vista operating system (and moan about it’s complexity) so Billy can continue to make a huge difference…
Bill and Melissa Gates – They’ve radically changed over a million peoples lives for the better through their fight against malaria. They also helped the unbanning of a poison called DDT that is the only effective insecticide against the malarial mosquito.
The US Government forced the world wide banning of DDT about 15 years ago (many say for economic reasons...). If the US can't be part of the solution, then at least don't become part of the problem.
We of the 3rd world may march to different tunes than the "Star-Spangled Banner" but we are not "children of a lesser god". America doesn't ALWAYS know best.
have a great week.
John Bond
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DDT was banned (lamentably) as a direct result of Rachel Carson's·"Silent Spring"·and all the hand-wringing that ensued. ·She was the environmentalist Cassander Cassandra of her day.
That is an interesting perspective that I had not considered.
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
It's not surprising that the mosquitos are killed by it, because they've grown immune to all the other pesticides. Unfortunately, evolution is going to take care of DDT as well. What are your plans for fighting them when they become immune to DDT? Given that mosquitoes have a life cycle ranging from as little as 4 days up to a month, they zoom through breeding cycles quickly on their way to becoming immune. Super-DDT? Extra-whiz-pow-DDT?
Brute force eradication of mosquitoes is like cranking up the clock on CPUs. It all seems great until we hit the brickwall and have to get smarter and not stronger/faster. We're facing the same problem due to over use of antibiotics, resulting in staph and other infections that are immune to pretty much every drug we throw at them. I understand the malaria problem, but you need more than the stop gap of DDT to fix the problem.
Thanks,
PeterM
Yeah, we have it really good here in America (I·like it, too, by the way!). We have it so good, in fact, that we start worrying about other peoples problems, when we don't even know what they are (proof we don't have enough to worry about on a daily basis!) . I just read a blurb that says malaria kills about 2.5 million people world wide each year. In America, the animal that kills the most people is deer. Yep, Bambi. ~150 car accident fatalities every year. (If the source is credible, that is...) Think on those numbers the next time you want to ban a poison world wide.
Then again, I do like to see bald eagles when fishing... The reality of it is, we should have environmental controls here, where we are affluent enough to afford it. Spending a small portion of my income to protect our natural resources is ok with me. As long as I have enough for food, shelter, and the things I need/want. But we need to be careful not to force our standards on other·people. Especially those who’s lives would be devastated by trying to achieve our standards.
I'd like to meet the guy who made a working welder with scrap metal, and twine. He's got to be pretty bright, or tenacious at least! Probably be a great guy to have working for me!
-Dan
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"A saint-like quantity of patience is a help, if this is unavailable, a salty vocabulary works nearly as well." - A. S. Weaver
Peter
DDT, partly because of the improved mist application and our understanding of the mosquito life cycle, has been getting more and more effective against malaria and less of a threat to wild life. It's worked effectively since the 1950s or for 55 years. What's interesting is that the area where malaria is endemic (commonly found) is growing dramatically smaller in Southern Africa. There are large areas that they don’t need to spray any more.
I nearly died from malaria in 1976 (my second of four infections) and I also know how debilitating the non fatal type of malaria can be so I must admit I'm VERY biased. My approach is "Let's tackle this problem one step at a time".
My Welder - I was given it by Colin Flett, the old guy who made it
The plans were from Popular Mechanics some time in the 1930's. It was made from the thin steel sheeting from the packing cases that car parts were delivered in. These were cut with airplane shears. I don't know where the wire came from. It is very inefficient and gets hot, even when there was no load. It hums loudly when idle and roars when welding because the plates are a bit loose. It shocks the st!! out of you if you aren't careful (we use 240V).
And it is the best welder an amateur could wish for, easy start and very controllable arc. (I should sell the design)
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Chris Savage
Parallax Tech Support
I just goes to show that nothing is new.....but a re-invention of some other old thing.
Very interesting picture.
James L
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James L
Partner/Designer
Lil Brother LLC (SMT Assembly Services)