tinyTesla DIY Tesla coil kit for beginners

[inductionheater123]

Hi guys I'm a high school student new to this forum and want to learn about electronics. What's a good kit to start with? I found the tinyTesla kit on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onetesla/tinytesla-the-little-singing-tesla-coil-anyone-can but I don't know if it's something good to start with. Is it too hard, or too easy? I'm taking physics right now and I've soldered before. Thanks for the help everyone.

 

[D.A.(Tony)Stewart]

The Tesla kit is a great introduction to high voltage Engineering with some small circuit board to drive the tracking oscillator & HV generator.

the Chinese are now up to 1.5GV (+/-750kV) transmission lines surpassing ABB's best.

It should be easy to make and you will learn how resonance and rectification can work at high voltage with low stray capacitance on an air coil can store low voltage current and convert that into high voltage low current with electric fields that arc to the sharpest points which produce a much higher E field than the smooth donut that is provided so that it does not breakdown at a lower voltage from the large smooth surface. Background reading of Faraday's Book of Magnetism or Tesla's patents is recommended, both searchable on the web.

Tesla's inventions not only created the standard donut shape used now on all long EHV insulator bushings, secondary resonant wiring methods with a high turns ratio. Similar to an old auto ignition coil but rated for higher voltage but less current. He also understood the perfection of nature's best insulator and the importance of pure Mica. All insulators are dielectrics and visa versa, including air breaks down with a lower voltage with low pressure ( so spark plugs under compression need much higher voltage in 3mm gap than in air.) , until you get to a vacuum a which performs with the highest breakdown voltage per meter... which explains why lighting on other planets is much greater.

Like Lightning arcs between clouds heard on AM radio's HV has a very complex set of physics which occurs in AC HV power transformers called Partial Discharge, which has been a thesis topic from EE students that has been explored about 10thousand times.. according to Google Scholar search engine.