BillyGreen1973
Senior Member
I have built a smallish tesla coil and have it working fairly well.
The main thing in getting better performance is finding the resonant frequency of the secondary coil and changing the primary coil inductance to match the same resonant freq.
There is a little gadget based on a 555 that can help do this, see here..
http://www.rmcybernetics.com/projects/DIY_Devices/homemade_tesla_coil_tuner.htm
(circuit below)
It produces a variable frequency square wave and the bi-colour LED indicates the current 'peak' at resonance.
My problem is this, I would like to measure the frequency of resonance found by the 'tuner' in the above link, and display it on an LCD. The frequencies expected are in the range of 150Khz to 2.5Mhz.
The way I see it there are two options...
1. use a fast picaxe and the 'count' command to find the frequency once the tuner has indicated resonance.
or
2. Use a picaxe instead of the 555 to output a series on frequencies using the PWMout command and check for resonance at each step.
I have been searching the forum all day and there are several threads relating to frequency measurement, but all of them are either looking at frequencies way higher than I need (and therefore use some form of IC prescaler), or are looking at frequencies below 100Khz.
I think it should be possible to directly measure or produce frequencies in the required range without any other major components. It doesn't need to be too accurate, a resolution of 1khz would be fine.
Anyone have any ideas for a starting point?
The main thing in getting better performance is finding the resonant frequency of the secondary coil and changing the primary coil inductance to match the same resonant freq.
There is a little gadget based on a 555 that can help do this, see here..
http://www.rmcybernetics.com/projects/DIY_Devices/homemade_tesla_coil_tuner.htm
(circuit below)
It produces a variable frequency square wave and the bi-colour LED indicates the current 'peak' at resonance.
My problem is this, I would like to measure the frequency of resonance found by the 'tuner' in the above link, and display it on an LCD. The frequencies expected are in the range of 150Khz to 2.5Mhz.
The way I see it there are two options...
1. use a fast picaxe and the 'count' command to find the frequency once the tuner has indicated resonance.
or
2. Use a picaxe instead of the 555 to output a series on frequencies using the PWMout command and check for resonance at each step.
I have been searching the forum all day and there are several threads relating to frequency measurement, but all of them are either looking at frequencies way higher than I need (and therefore use some form of IC prescaler), or are looking at frequencies below 100Khz.
I think it should be possible to directly measure or produce frequencies in the required range without any other major components. It doesn't need to be too accurate, a resolution of 1khz would be fine.
Anyone have any ideas for a starting point?
