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If you, like us, thought that capacitor orientation only matters for polarized varieties like electrolytic capacitors you should read through this article. [Bruce Trump] looks at why some film capacitors have a stripe printed on one end and why their orientation can matter. He has an image rolled into his post showing both axial and [...]

Tags:  way orientation film bruce-trump film-capacitors electrolytic-capacitors capacitor Hardware  

[GranTotem] is delighted by the sparks put out when a capacitor is rapidly discharged. But he’s not impressed at the relatively slow process of connecting them to a power supply for a recharge. So he built this auto-charging station for his capacitors that provides a shockingly good time almost continuously. Check out the video to see what we mean. We always like [...]

Tags:  fun capacitor charger charging-station capacitors misc hacks  

We’re happy to see some links rolling in from our call for Hackerspace introductions. This is sort of a reintroduction of The Geek Group. They’ve been around for a while and we’ve featured several interesting projects coming out of the collective (check out this pulse capacitor autopsy). You may remember some tax woes they ran into [...]

Tags:  group hackerspace geek michigan grand-rapids tax-woes grand-rapids-michigan capacitor Hackerspaces  

You won’t find [Antoine] stumbling around in the dark. He just finished working on this LED flashlight which draws power from a super-capacitor (translated). He realized that lighting a high-efficiency LED takes so little power that there are many benefits in play when deciding to move away from batteries. When compared to a super capacitor, batteries [...]

Tags:  led power supercap antoine led-flashlight high-efficiency capacitor hacks  

[Norman] put together a rather impressive 22,500 uF capacitor bank. In addition to find things to torture with the strong magnetic field generated by a sudden discharge, he’d like to measure the current pushed from the device. He’s found a way to do this using a digital storage oscilloscope. To protect the oscilloscope [Norman] built his [...]

Tags:  bank oscilloscope capacitor norman capacitor-bank sudden-discharge digital-storage misc hacks  

Instructable user [EngineeringShock] got sick of buying batteries for his devices all the time and has instead opted to build himself a super capacitor bank that can be used to power common household items. His “forever” rechargeable capacitor bank is made of two large super capacitors rated at 400 farads apiece. It is charged through [...]

Tags:  bank capacitor variable capacitor-bank farads household-items misc hacks  

[Daniel Eindhoven] put together this 11,344 Joule capacitor bank that he says would be perfect for weapons such as a rail gun, coil gun, or electrothermal-chemical gun. He machined a couple of aluminum plates to act as a positive and negative bus. The two are separated by a denuded sheet of PCB (making us wonder [...]

Tags:  gun bank capacitor daniel-eindhoven capacitor-bank aluminum-plates coil-gun news  

Ever wondered how expensive versus cheap multimeters hold up to abuse? [Dave] gives us a pretty good idea by, well, blowing them up. He’s using a capacitor bank to put roughly 4.2 KiloVolts into the poor little meters. If you absolutely must skip to the multimeters, go to about 5:00. You really will miss out [...]

Tags:  boom capacitor idea dave capacitor-bank kilovolts classic hacks