I'll let him tell you more about it, but here's a video of it in action.
This is only at 15% power, so it's likely we will be able to get bigger sparks. It is the sparks that are making the sound - that's not just a weird backing track
Also if you have any suggestions for tracks to play we'd love to hear them!
I'm going to hunt down the MIDI files for those tracks later on and give it a shot when it's dark .
Building it was great fun - thankfully the kit included all of the components, so all that was required was a lot of soldering, gluing and assembly. All in all, it was probably 5 hours of work to build it and then another few hours troubleshooting some initial problems (arcing from primary to secondary). I have to admit, I was a tad nervous when powering it on for the first time - it's the first time I've build something mains powered from the component level.
Thanks for the suggestions folks . I tried to download some of the midi files to play tonight (now that it's dark outside), but it gave me an error about midi channels. I think the midi files that I downloaded from the tesla coil site have been arranged to work well on the tesla coil, so I'll need to edit these a little (to add notes to channel 0).
wow some present.
