Yay, I’m finally documenting my Halloween costume (which unfortunately blew up the day before halloweekend). Here is a video of hatcoil, a small DRSSTC on top of a hat. AKA, a really bad idea.

Technical details:

28V A123 battery pack

28-180 boost

4xHGTG 30N60B3D IGBT full-bridge with GDT drive

~1200 turn secondary on 1″ PVC

Innertube topload

Really, it’s just a DRSSTC. Nothing less, nothing more, nothing fancy. It was a bit tricky to make a bridge appropriately sized, and even harder to make a boost converter for it. In fact, the boost never truly worked. If I play a mid to high note for a few seconds, the boost can’t keep up and it fades away. I think this is due to saturation of my boost core, but I haven’t really taken the time to do much on this since now I’m back in the gate driver world and also have to throw together my 6.131 power electronics final project. I’ll fix hatcoil in February.

The optically linked controller is an atmega328 based board which reads MIDI files off of a microSD card for playback. Thanks to my friend Jeff Heidel for assistance in getting the midi parser working.

Schematic:



Logic Board:



The whole thing:



Trolling 6.131:



Winding and making shiny thing:



Controller:

