so i was thinking.. the guitar puts out ac wave forms...so what as long as u have decent output pickups. u should put out around 180-300mv of power with your pickups.. so what if we were to rectify that. using some small shotcky diodes.. and have say a 3V lithium bat pack on board for a jfet preamp circuit.. so what i was thinking is making a charging circuit that creates voltage as you play?? i know there is alot more to it than this. but worth thinking about..
now.. i have an x2n in my guitar. which is supposed to put out 510mv and i use at least 13's on it so surely i coudl get some sort of juice otu of it.. hmm mayve add an ultra small transformer from one of those camera flashers in a disposable camera.
hahahaha I was actaully thinking about the same thing last night...doubt the voltage is high enough though...
how about a self powered wah ? :-D
the lowest forward voltage drop for a schottky diode that I can find is 320mV. You loose twice this in a full wave bridge. Even if you had 1VAC (twice what you have!) coming out of your pickups you'd only end up with 0.25VDC.
And any current draw from the charging circuit would load the pickups down and the voltage would drop even further.
Perhaps better off having a solar panel on your guitar? That way, when you play big stadiums with heaps of lights...
No, wait... a generator hooked up to your arm, so when you do the "windmill" move you're charging your battery?
Hook something up to your drummers bass pedal?
Sit on an excercise bike?
Wear lots of nylon?
I'm surprised no ones using phantom power for guitars. Easy enough to convert it to a balanced system, and phantom is readily available from mixers and stand-alone units!
What about using this gizmo in a Wah-Wah to recharge a main battery used by many effects?
http://www.haimei.com/novelty/index.htm
Some old clocks have an electromagnetic driver to sustain the pendulum's movement, maybe something like that inside a guitar body could work the other way around.
or you could simply build passive pedals like my earth-saver boost, which was a custom transformer-based booster. 8^) went over like a lead balloon... i think i sold 2.
i also made a one-off earth saver boost/octave, also with no battery. transformers are nice for that kind of thing. 8^)
Quote from: zachary vexor you could simply build passive pedals like my earth-saver boost, which was a custom transformer-based booster. 8^) went over like a lead balloon... i think i sold 2.
i also made a one-off earth saver boost/octave, also with no battery. transformers are nice for that kind of thing. 8^)
zachary zepellin anyone..???
sorry z just pickin with ya.. you don';t ahve a pic of thist thing do ya i 2would like to see it.
I'd also like to see it, I remember talking to you a tiny bit about it a long time ago...
-Colin
....I put a wind up DC generator that I removed from one of those wind-up radios into a box with two 1.5 volt versions of that Olsen Fuzz.....it sounds interesting,but works o.k.......now if I can build a wind up Leslie cabinet/amp..........
FEW! Glad I apologised in advanced yesterday... coz those calcs I gave were way off! I did stumble accross an interesting circuit last night though. No idea of the cap or diode values, no idea of the current requirements... but it's interesting nonetheless!
------------------->|---------------o
| | |
--- - |
2Vsec --- ^ |
| | |
| | | Vout = 3Vsec - 3Vdiode
|---->|----| |
| | |
-. ,- --- ---
)|( ---Vsec ---3Vsec
)|( | |
-' '------------------------------------o
Half-wave voltage tripler
created by Andy´s ASCII-Circuit v1.24.140803 Beta www.tech-chat.de
One of the depressing things about formal training is that you sooner or later come face to face with the three laws of thermodynamics. The laws say in essence:
1. You can't win. (you can't get more out of something than you put in or is already in there)
2. You can't even break even. (friction, conduction, and other radiation losses eat up some of every energy transformation, so you lose some every time you do something with it)
3. You can calculate how bad it will be. (stuff about entropy, etc.)
Taken together, you have to put in enough energy to power whatever it is that you want to power, plus supply the losses in any transformation.
It is certainly possible to power pedals from a bicycle-driven generator. It is probably possible to run some pedals from a wah-style rocker that you whomp on continuously. It is unlikely, given the efficiency of electromechanical conversion at guitar pickups, that you could power even a single pedal from pickups. The pickups don't pick enough up from the strings, or the strings wouldn't ring like they do. Maybe a thousand guitarists and some pretty fancy circuitry might power one pedal, but I don't know even ten guitarists that can play in unison, so the human element might be the failing there. 8-)
Lots of people have tried to break one or more of the three laws, but these all qualify as something that Mother Nature has said is non-negotiable. Energy out is always equal to energy in (including stored energy) plus losses, and without really good efficiency, losses kill you.
Hmmm... thumbnailing the signal levels, you get 100mv from a guitar pickup from maybe a 5K impedance. With a matched load of 5K for best possible power transfer, you are getting 100mv*100mv/10K= 1*10-6 or 1uW out, of which half can be transferred to that 5K load. That's about the best you can do, if you can strum fast and hard enough to keep that 100mv going. Super humbuckers turn out maybe half a volt, but from a 20K impedance or so. No win there.
So you have half a microwatt to start with. Your pedal has to use less than that, and any losses subtract from the amount the pedal has to use.
You need to make the voltage at least ten times as large as the rectifier losses to get the efficiency of the rectifiers themselves to 90%. So even with schottky diodes, you need to step the voltage up to 6V or so for 0.3V drop schottky diodes (I'm assuming you want to full wave rectify and not throw away half the power there.) Might as well go all the way and step it up to 10-11V with a really ..good.. signal transformer that doesn't lose any of the highs, and produce 9V directly. Except that rectification is really only good for peaks, so you throw away about 3/4 of the power by rectifying only peaks. Lets say you now have 375nW at 9V and are not losing much elsewhere. Your pedal circuit can have 41nA to run on. That's about the leakage current of three or four diodes NOT conducting.
It won't run an indicator LED, either 8-)
well you know for every crazy scheme that willl work that i come up with i have to come up wiht one like this. or i wouldn't be mee.. but then again i did do something that is kind of hard on this forum i got everyone to think and not complain. lol
:? Well I believe I have one circuit lying around somewhere, that tried to take "free" energy. It was a super low current consumption led blinking circuit, and the idea was that the energy was taken from ac mains hum which is easily available in most places :wink: But I remember you needed ten meters long antenna for it. But current needed for the led blinker was something that a normal battery would last for years. Maybe you could take some mains hum signal from a guitar cord with two hot conductors and take the power to super low consumption led blinker from it. But you would need a battery for the rest circuit anyway. But maybe you *can* put a led to Z Vex eco pedal, or any passive design, without batteries using this kind of idea :roll:
There has been some circuits around for battery-less superbright led torch: take output from a stepper motor, rectify it and store the voltage in a big el cap. Few twists and led lights up for long time. Think they use similar in submarine boats :roll: Sure this could be used for wah...
[quote"Nasse"]Sure this could be used for wah...[/quote]
Yeah, and it'll build up your leg muscles at the same time! Get good at playing at funk fusion tempos before attempting this! My boss has built one of these, and it takes reasonable effort. It does light for a long time, but at a dull glow, the useful light fades fairly quickly. Perfect for those pesky blackouts!
you may not be able to get something for nothing, but you can get something for something. here's a guts pic of my earth saver octave/boost showing the custom-designed transformer and the rest of the parts... 4 germanium diodes, a dpdt selector switch, dpdt stomp switch, one cap, and two jacks. the thing had an enormous number of taps. multiple humbucking coils, actually. no battery!
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/attachment.php?s=&postid=7187721
oh, and the outside.
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/attachment.php?s=&postid=7187712
cool i like that.. man. al i need to know now is wehre is the sound sample.
and or how did it sound. and
THANK YOU MAN
well, in boost mode it was kind of funny. it doubled the output of the guitar (amplitude was basically 2X) but the frequency response was horrible going straight from guitar to boost to amp. the low-end was perfect, huge, but the treble really got lost. turned single-coils into humbuckers. however, and this is the funny part, if you used it after ANY non-true-bypass effect like a boss or ibanez, it sounded excellent... louder and clearer. buffered-bypass effects have such low-output-impedance that they can drive transformer-based boosters quite well. it was really creamy and natural sounding, of course, being just a transformer.
and the octave was similar to an octavia, not terribly loud, but very very pure and pretty. it did the octave thing better than boost by itself. the decay on the octave was quite dramatic... it would decay at an alarming rate if the guitar was plugged straight in. like a damped bell. still really pretty though.
sometime i'll make a sample. my m-box isn't osX compatible yet... or at least i haven't installed the new software, which i must have around here somewhere.
cool man so the tranformer was like that of the octavia
yes, but instead of relying on a transistor-based boost driving the transformer, it was carefully designed to transfer as much energy as possible from the very poor high-impedance pickups (actually varying by frequency from 5k to about 10 megs) of a guitar into a set of voltage-losing germanium diodes and onto the hell the horrible input impedance of a typical amp (1 meg). why they don't make 5 or 10 meg input impedance amps is way beyond me. they would sound so much nicer, although they'd quickly reveal the flaws in your cables and connections.
cool man
Great stuff Zach. Thanks for sharing that. :)
I've played with similar ideas. What I refer to as "passive effects" which are effects that require no power. Fun stuff. Coils, inductors, and transformers are one way to make passive effects. Ansil's write up on the Black Ice / Diodes on the guitar signal is another.
Andrew
How bout just slappin a couple of solar panels on the front of your axe? They look cool enough... what more could you ask for?
Anyone try using one of those 8 or 4 ohm to 1k miniature audio tranny's. If you apply a 9 volt pulse to the secondary you get 300 vdc out on the primary. If you rectify the ac from your guitar pickups and say get 100mv that should provide 3 volts or more. These tranny's are even available at radio shack.
There is actually lots on the net on inductive coupling and charging. Looking at an electric toothbrush that has inductive charging. Applying the technology on a smaller scale may work.Also I wonder about extracting rf voltage from the guitar strings and rectifying that along with the tranny. Possibly use all this power for lighting an led which in turn can utilize a solar cell previously mentioned.
I originally mentioned this in the richardson forum which seems to randomly appear and disappear :x
the loss of efficiency and destruction of the tone of the pickups are always involved in connecting the pickup's output to any device that attempts to extract useful electrical energy. the total wattage available from a guitar pickup is nearly negligible... think about it... it can barely provide about 50mV average across a 250,000 ohm potentiometer before the signal begins to deteriorate. so even if you could extract all of that energy without disturbing the guitar's signal any further, look at the numbers:
while playing,
current:
E=IR
.05V=I*250,000
.05/250,000 =I
.0000002 amps =I
.0002 mA=I
power
P=IA
P=.0000002A*.05 V
P=.00000001 watt=.01 microwatts.
now in my very most efficient effect, the Woolly Mammoth, current draw is less than .5mA at 9 Volts, for a whopping 9*.0005=4,500 microwatts.
look at the difference. a pickup can safely generate .01 microwatts, while a very efficient pedal needs half-a-million times that much in order to operate. even if you factor in errors of a couple of magnatudes... let us say that you were running a pedal on 1.5 V (it's possible... the old maestro fuzz-tones did this) and so got the power needs down by a factor of 100, to 45 microwatts, and then you loaded down the guitar pickup by a factor of 100 to extract more power and simply ignored the fact that the guitar's pickup was going to start sounding terribly dull and lose all sustain, making it generate say 1 microwatt, you see we're still off by a factor of 50. it's a labor of constantly diminishing returns. we end up back at the same juncture as was reached by all of the science-minded posters before... you can't get something for nothing.
so, the solution is to either create such an efficient transformer-based system that you can eliminate the need for active components in your pedal, like i did, or to mount solar cells on your pedals and store the output in rechargable batteries inside. you only need 1.5 volts to power certain types of pedals. you can easily string up four sets of silicon solar cells on top of a pedal and keep one of those charged with available light. you could probably extract an average of 45 mW from a set of cells like that. check out these stats:
http://www.jameco.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prmenbr=91&prrfnbr=354459&cgrfnbr=501&ctgys=
Voltage: 2.0; current 200mA
Size: 3.0"L x 3.7"W x 0.2" Thick
now obviously that's in full sunlight, but 3X3.7 is probably smaller than the available area on the top of a 1590BB, and 2 volts can certainly power germanium transistors, and well, lookie there! 2 volts times .2 A is 400 mW of power in full sun, which probably drops down to one tenth or more of that inside under house lights. so you can get an average of 40 mW out of solar cells that would fit on top of your 1590BB box? think about it. i wonder if you could plug that 2 volts into a maxim voltage-doubling chip? well, so did this robot-maker. check out this site (complete with movies) for a solar-powered light-seeking robot. if you built your pedal into one of these, it could find its own light source when you weren't using it, recharging for later use. 8^)
z
http://www.robotroom.com/XSBoost.html
dang z i got to talk toyou more offten i was building some simlpe robots in high school and i used to add robtoic arms and stuff to toyz when i was a kid..
i've never built them. i just did a search and discovered some remarkable similarities between what this guy is trying to do and the idea of this thread... to power pedals for free.
well still u seem interesting man..
Those solar panels are quite impressive. How bout a special high output pickup that is wired out of the guitars volume and tone circuit (dummy pickup) designed for off the scale output, eliminating tone problems powering low forward voltage mini leds which in turn provide light for the panels to work. Maybe highly reflective materials in the cavity to aid the light dissipation.
Trick being to get one panel supplying even more power for the next stage of high brightness leds. Of course I haven't checked to see the current requirements of todays ultra mini low forward voltage leds, but I do know they exist. If all this did work it would have to charge a battery of some type or charge a cap or two for when the voltage level drops.
You are right when it comes to manipulating transformers. There is plenty of room for experimentation . I ended up with a power free octave device that did work great , unfortunately it did require quite the driving voltage to work properly but it did track perfectly with excellant decay and I may quietly market it yet.
You could use batteries or have alittle more fun and use large capcitors like say oh...a Fered. ;)
Take a look at what kind of effect you might want to build. There are obvious ones that you shouldn't bother with like boasters but there are other lower power effects that you could make.
When I started playing with passive and lower/self power effects trying various ideas I got a few pointers for a robot guy I know named Mark Tilden.
Andrew
Dead links, Zach!
Interesting though... got some left? ;)
*edit*
10M inputs? I hope you like Russian radio ;)
I actually had an almost-perfect feedback situation like that:
stand this way: octave
stand this way: fifth
stand this way: fifth octave
stand this way: back to octave (by this time I'm thinking I'm way cool and getting looks from the band)
stand this way: Polish/Russian (sorry if I offend anyone, I just dont speak the lingo) radio. What the *^%#$@? Back to:
stand this way; octave. Good. Move again: radio. Dang.
dead links? no, neither of the links i posted above are dead. they both work perfectly... jameco goes to the solar cell page i chose, and the robot one goes right to that page.
The Jameco and robot links work, but the two harmony central links are now dead.
Is that what you were referring to Mike?
Take care,
-Peter
i guess they only last for so long.
Now I don't want to get serious on a humourous thread, but I saw something a while back that got me thinking.
Stepper motors are throw-away items in ald typewriters, printers, etc. They also put out a fair bit of power if you spin them. I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out how to spin them while playing an Ebmaj7-13th chord.
The other easily tappable power source is from all that carbo that you ate all day. Yep, your body puts out about 50W (I think) of heat. To work out how to tap that energy source, check out Peltier devices and thermocouples on Google. An added piece of trivia is that your head puts out HEAPS of convertable heat, so maybe Ansil will invent a hat-powered pedal for us.
(Does anybody else have this thing where you can remember all this dumb-ass trivial stuff, but can't remember where you parked your car?)
ah yes... like being able to remember half a billion electronic part numbers and equations, but forgeting your girlfriends birthday every year without fail!?!?!
... no, I don't have that "thing"... nope, not me...
Quote from: brett
The other easily tappable power source is from all that carbo that you ate all day. Yep, your body puts out about 50W (I think) of heat. To work out how to tap that energy source, check out Peltier devices and thermocouples on Google. An added piece of trivia is that your head puts out HEAPS of convertable heat, so maybe Ansil will invent a hat-powered pedal for us.
(Does anybody else have this thing where you can remember all this dumb-ass trivial stuff, but can't remember where you parked your car?)
lol i guess i will have to do that. i did actually come up with a way to make a battery powerd fan in my shoes recharge the batterie off of the heat, but i had a little help with that. i got some wicked hot feet..
Ever since I heard MC Hawking's (http://www.mchawking.com) "Entropy," it always pops into my head whenever conservation of energy is discussed. So, on the subject of "you can't get something for nothing:"
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Edit: I should probably say in advance that MC Hawking is a joke site whose concept, using the speech synthesizer voice (AT&T's?) Steven Hawking uses to do gangster rap, seems and may be offensive to some here. However, it's pretty popular at many physics departments; I heard it from my friend who had just finished his undergrad work.
Supposedly Steven Hawking himself has heard and enjoyed the songs, but I just felt a disclaimer was necessary.
ok, more crazy schemes...
I'm picturing a small, gas burning power plant, built into a backpack. This is an energy conversion utility, if you will. Baked beans provide the raw energy source and the human digestive tract does the complex chemical conversion needed to provide the turbines with methane...
Perhaps this is better suited to attachement to the roadies and crew. On a big enough show (like The Rolling Stones) you could possibly power not just the pedals but the amp walls as well!
well it isnt' exactly diy, but i have been working with hv and water to split it into its two primary gasses so making a hydrogen fuel cell would be interesting hmm but it could explode so well better be carefull lol
I was checking out piezo crystals and was pretty surprised at some of the info. Check this out on a BATTERY FREE radio transmitter/reciever that has a range of 300 meters.
http://www.memsnet.org/news/1048517334-1/
Those links work fine. Thanks Zach!, I got engrossed in robots, and forgot I was a guitar player! :shock: Neat stuff! Do they make a Hopps sniffing chip that will allow my robot to bring a Mic Lite to the soldering bench?
Quote from: zachary vexthe loss of efficiency and destruction of the tone of the pickups are always involved in connecting the pickup's output to any device that attempts to extract useful electrical energy. http://www.robotroom.com/XSBoost.html
In a Les Paul there are 2 pickups. When playing one, the other could be used to recharge the batt. I guess...
This is interesting :D