Awesome Plasma

Mehdi from ElectroBOOM shows us how he modified a battery-powered plasma lighter to produce sound. After showing how it’s possible to listen to an AM radio through a pickle, he moves on to building a circuit that modulates voltage to play audio via the lighter’s arc. Warning: electrical engineering lecture ahead.

We already know that Tesla coils can be used to make music. This video from Ideas1+1 shows what happens when you interfere with the coil’s plasma emissions by placing other objects in the way and letting the current pass through them. We can’t decide if the spinning arcs or those in the syringe were the coolest to watch.

This electric plasma arc lighter stands out from the crowd with a metal case and a fold-out arm to extend its reach. Powered by a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, it sparks fires using an arc of electric plasma. Its case is made from die-cast zinc and tumbled brass, and it offers about 280 seconds of arc time per charge.

We’ve seen cool toys that look like ray guns but none that fire a ray. After building a Halo-inspired plasma knife, Jay from the Plasma Channel returned to his workbench to create a raygun that shoots powerful bursts of static electricity from its tip. The 120,000-volt, 3D-printed gizmo produces an arc that becomes visible when shorting it directly to ground.

Plasma is created by adding energy to a gas. It’s why stars glow in the sky. On a smaller scale, man-made plasma can be created with high-voltage electricity. The Plasma Channel applied this knowledge to one of the sweetest knives ever, a dual-blade weapon with plasma arcing through its center. He hopes to eventually replicate Halo’s plasma sword.

The blasters in Star Wars supposedly fire bolts of plasma energy held together with a magnetic field. This sounds like pure science fiction, but Jake Makes wanted to see if he could create the same effect with a real-world weapon. While he came up with an approach that looks pretty accurate, it’s not technically the same idea at all.

Hacksmith Industries has made plasma lightsabers in the past, but they all required a bulky external energy source to function. Now they’ve figured out a way to go cordless. Their latest design produces a face-melting 4500ºF beam, but its fuel and power source fit inside its (very long) handle. The 11,000-watt torch runs for 3 minutes per refill.

What’s more fun than playing with powerful neodymium magnets? Adding high voltage electricity, that’s what! Magnetic Games shows us some of the fascinating kinds of plasma arcs that form as 20,000 volts are applied to different shapes, sizes, and arrangements of magnets.

After melting all of the strings on his piano with high-voltage sparks, Mattias Krantz wanted to see if he could still make music with the thing. So he got to work building a series of circuits that fire plasma arcs onto the piano’s metal backboard to make sounds when he presses the piano’s keys. But it wasn’t easy getting it to work.

If you’ve never seen one, a plasma popper is an awesome-looking device that directs a ball of propane gas through a series of twisted tubes. Charles over at Hacksmith Industries was asked to build a plasma popper, then leveled up the challenge with bigger and bigger versions, culminating with a massive fireball maker.

There are lots of machines out there that can cut holes in flat sheets of steel, but MarkGyver built a machine that can make cuts into the curved face of a cylinder. Using a high-heat plasma cutter and a chain-driven rotating holder, the computer-controlled system can make smooth cuts through the surface of a steel tube.

After building a retractable blade lightsaber, The Hacksmith is back to show off what this impressive plasma weapon can do. Watch in awe as it burns right through a Stormtrooper, slashes through walls, and melts metal and glass like butter. It’s not as quick at cutting as the ones in the movies, but just as awesome.