Wait, you mean to say it's not ACTUALLY a pixie pregnancy test?!

It's not entirely wrong either. I use one to trigger a mosfet with a photoresistor. Without it it's a great burn-your-house-down-at-sunset-or-sunrise timer.

Does anyone give a Schmitt or two?

Derek N. Eder yeah probably not totally correct there either but, you get the general idea. Amplify the shit out if the signal, threshold it to get a nicer blinkenlight and then do something to also get sound.

I bet your a blast at parties.

Older than Jesus when he was a cowboy. lol

Hey, but he complimented the eyebrows, thats a win... right?

The Rustiest Shackleford oof

All we know about uncle bumblefuck is that he’s older than carprentry itsblelf

Lol electroboom

Natural ergonomics

Really? my experience with that shape is that you can't hold it up for much over 5 minutes!

@@GashimahironChl You must have replaced the 9 volt dry cell with a 12 volt deep cycle....

smells something fierce though after a long day's work

"feels good in the hand".

So close with the big Clive reference, but it’s the vice of knowledge 👍

Fool bridge rectifier!!!!

Yes, the vice of knowledge, the hammer of enlightenment and the pipe grips of perpetual inquisitiveness. Dunno what he calls his pliers though.

Hammer of enlightenment? Did you mean x-ray? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/erqjgMeXmqrFgIk.html&t=4m46s

The technical term is "unibrow."

good one rofl

:(

I know a former licensed electrician who tests voltage by putting wires in his mouth and seeing how it feels. I’m serious. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.

WarGamingRefugee YEP to that comment, and have them get conduit strechers, and go find a left hand screwdriver. Lol

A bucket of prop wash. A tube of elbow grease.

Yeah, he's right, makes the pixies REALLY angry

Sparky Projects The whole purpose of a schmitt trigger is to provide hysteresis to a basic comparator

Bad experiences (detection unreliability) with the original Fluke model. Acquired a Uni-Trend UT12A detector (via a colleague who's dad worked for Uni-Trend), and that's lasted years - VERY reliable, and acceptably sensitive (i.e. relatively immune from floating neutral false detection). Recently acquired the "new" gadget from Mustool - their MT812. Interesting in that this has a graded (LED bar-graph) response - sensitive enough to detect neutral return / low induced voltages (so useful for tracing "de-energised" cables), but also capable of discriminating between "live" and "induced voltages". Not enough experience to fully trust this for "last minute checking", but it seems as good as the old Uni-Trend for high(er) voltage detection. Any other "early adopters" out there for comments??

Have you had any experience with Santronics testers? Being an electrician for the last 18 years I have found it to be very simple and sensitive.

santronics the best 17 yrs in business. no on/off switch VERY reliable

wowzer i justs had a nerdgazum

He kinda did, those pliers are like a handheld vise. x10 force multiplication in yer hands.

Mustie1 lol

Mustie, stop killing time watching you tube videos & get that Jawa fixed... haha

"Dident"? What's that supposed to mean (to you)?

Hello Kitty Lover Man! Fukk aff gremmore natsee

Markus_B if you go deep enough it’s all JFM.

Explanation wasn't totally wasted on me because I just bought one of these and I was motivated to know how it worked, but I wasn't happy to hear that when I stick it in the socket "I" am electro charged. My heart skips beats as it is, I don't want to BE a capacitor. :-/

Crystal S. interesting. I guess then, when our heart beats, the electricity has to go somewhere, and that "somewhere" is the capacitance in the rest of our body? Still scary. I've seen capacitors blow!

Tusker Wood & Stone Concepts probably not that long, he just went with a shape he was familiar with holding onto

Ah yes, I see what you did there

If in doubt, trace it out.

He used his favorite tool from the workshop.

sure you can. I drive 12v solenoid valves off 24 volts all the time; two 12 volt marker bulbs in parallel wired in series with the coil. You can also use LEDs on high voltage with the right value resistor...

sorry, 2 24v bulbs.

Those two scenarios your describing aren't resistor dividers, those are current limiting resistors. the lightbulbs limit the current in the coil, and the resistor limits the current through the LED. Your idea in the video about powering a 5v device off of a 9 volt battery won't work if the device needs more than a few milliamps.

Yup, what the other gentlemen here have said. Let's go through an example here: Say you've got a load that draws 1 amp at 12 V, but you've only got a 24V power supply. Should be easy, right? Just wire up two resistors of the same value in series (for simplicity sake, say 1K Ohm each), and attach the load at the middle point between the two resistors, and all is good, right? But do the math and you'll see that everything is not good! Before you attach the load, you'll have 24V/(2K ohm) = 12mA of current through both of the resistors. Attach the load, and suddenly you'll need to pull an additional 1 Amp through *only* the first resistor, which isn't going to happen if you keep that resistor value at 1K and the supply voltage at 24V (since V=IR, if you wanted to keep a 12V drop across the first resistor, you'd need to drop the resistance value down to ~12ohm - and get a resistor rated for 12W heehee!). If you know that the current draw will *always* be constant, then you could make it work by doing the proper math ahead of time. But if your current draw varies (such as with a motor with varying loads, a bunch of LEDs that you've got a dimmer attached to, etc), a resistive divider just won't work well for you. That's why (along with efficiency/heat concerns) voltage regulators are used when you're going to be actually powering something with a lower-than-supply voltage.

Rule of thumb is you want to pull no more than 1/10th of the current that goes through the whole divider on the center tap if you don't want to have to factor in the additional drop. Obviously that current shouldn't vary much.

High school is where we went to learn about life while they dumped useless information over our heads.

Paul Drake, I now have kids in high school. They still dump useless information over their heads. Actually, more now.

And they got rid of the good stuff. I had trig/analyt in11th and my kids highschool tops out at algebra 2

assassinlexx, how many of your friends did you shock the snot out of? I never thought of doing that? Lol

My friend in electric shop put a nail if each side of an outlet, laid his watch across them and powered it up. He didn’t understand why his watch wasn’t “shock proof” when it said it was. Not the brightest bulb...

Double FAK! Yes!

xoxo2008oxox close enough.

I squinted.

Ya. Me too.

600 volts really how odd.

fucking PRICELESS. I mean, you can buy them for a few bux, but the idea is priceless ;)

sporkfun ftw

Yes, fucking great. Waiting for caps and diodes...

I have the SMD version, the future is now old man

He hasn't made a vid since the swearing tazer. Lesson learned: never stop swearing.

poor guy is probably still scared of icbms hitting him...

Patron? He's 13, he spends all his lawn mowing money on mad magazines

It's no secret that Mike is AvEs nephew.

Looked like he was trying when he was connecting to the resistor.

beat me to it. i don't think he's quite right on this one.

The detector is not using your body. It also has nothing to do with capacitance. The transistors are also not amplifying. The transistors are just digitizing the signal to make it either yes/no. www.jameco.com/Jameco/workshop/JamecoFavorites/non-contact-AC-voltage-detector.html

It's the continuity testers that use your body as a cap and the second lead. AC "ticks" are inductive I think.

I always heard these things could go off on a magnet, I haven't had one in years, but I'm pretty sure I used to use one to test solenoid valves back in the day.

Because it doesnt have to be you. The air itself is a capacitor. The case of the tool is a capacitor. A rock, yup, you guessed it, is a capacitor.

The size of the conductor matters not, but for the motion of the electrons?

That home jobby is what impregnates the pixies, hence the ergonomic shape 😂

I can see how it would fit nicely in the hand.

I was wwondering if anyone else noticed the little Dickens

Wooosh

LOL, Newfie, you don't have the slightest idea that AvE is the kind of guy who would do that on purpose? Hahaha!

Did you mean electroculated?

Electrococulated

this comment triggered me

That's hysteresis

It's the shape of the device he used before.

Ha, yes, that normally is one thing NOT to put into an electrical socket. Oh the irony!

John Ridley You should get a multimeter... 👍 they dont try to kill you as often.

That's we electricals call them widowmakers. They have their uses, but never ever trust them 100%

I find them most useful in finding out which extension lead has gone dud when you have about half dozen daisy chained together.

He was probably rubbing it on his back.

buillioncubes this! I had an instance where I was asked to help with figuring out why a dryer wasn't working. It was getting 240 V, even with the power to the house killed. It wouldn't start anything, and when I'd hit the start switch for the dryer, the voltage would vanish, but come right back once I let go.

It is most commonly induced voltage. Ive seen as high as 200 volts induced on a 347/600v system. The thing is there is no load so if you ground it nothing happens. But youll still read the voltage.

OK, thanks! Ave's reasoning got me wondering.

Capacitive coupling across the Mains switch. A common problem, especially when your Main Breaker only disconnects phase (not neutral). Most NCD's are so sensitive (high nanoampere sensitive), that they will register any static voltage.

LOL - Me to!

Not much of a magnetic field around a wire that has no current flowing through it.

A pH meter has two electrodes. When you dip them in the solution under test (an electrolyte) a voltage develops between them. That voltage is dependent on pH. Confuser then converts voltage into appropriate pH readout.

The electronics are simple (high impedance FET millivoltmeter is all you need - an "off the shelf" cheap meter works fine!). The electrodes are the costly component (though there are cheap ones via the usual Chinese suppliers). If you are looking for an accurate, linear (over a wide range) pH meter - then you're going to have to spend a little more (actually a LOT more), but as always you get what you pay for.

SEMICONDUCTORS ARE MAGIC - my takeaway from studying physics.

DreamHazard; DreamHazard; Electricity is magic: My takeaway from first learning about it in grade school, not finding the explanations satisfactory, becoming annoyed enough to go study electrical engineering after highschool, still not really being OK with the whole thing, and currently, once again studying for an undergraduate degree, but this time in Physics. And it isn't even that I couldn't keep up and dropped out or something like that. The most frustrating part is that I have always gotten really good grades. I can't quite describe the feeling of graduating electrical engineering cum laude (which isn't that hard to do if I'm honest. The threshold is set waaay too low in my opinion, but I digress...), but still having no fucking clue what 'electricity' really is. For example: Do Cooper pairs 'travelling' through a superconductor also constitute electricity? Does the electron really have no size? As a simple example: To understand a simple circuit consisting of a DC voltage source, a switch and a lightbulb, you need to understand how (amongst many other things) the EM wave propagates once you close the switch; breaking out of the conductor and travelling along its surface, through the dielectric insulation around the cable. Just look at the "travelling through a dielectric" part: This is equivalent to light travelling through a transparent medium with some refractive index > 1. How is the light slowed down, without being otherwise affected? How is light generated when a charged particle (say, an electron) travels through the medium, at a speed faster than the phase velocity of light in that medium (basically, how does an electron going through the 'light-barrier' produce an 'optical boom'). Even when you finally grasp the answers given by the infinite path-integral approach of QED and applying relativity to it, it still leaves very fundamental questions lingering about; such as: HOW and WHY does a specific electron actually absorb or emit a photon? Is the probabilistic nature of absorbtion/emission the exact same mechanism as that which governs the photon's probabilistic travelling wave-function, which interacts with all possible atoms/particles and paths through the dielectric, or is it just modelled the same. Sorry for the long rant. You can probably tell it's an incredibly frustrating subject, which is also very close to my heart.

Or about any brand of transparent tape. Right?

Would you rather he called you a condenser?

Did you just assume his capacitance?

Torsten B if the schmoo fitz

There’s gonna be a FIGHT!

I thought Tesla was all about DC and it was Edison and Westinghouse supporting AC.

Nope.. Tesla was for AC and Edison was for DC.. Edison tried to show everyone how "dangerous" AC was by electrocuting a pig..

SuperPickle15 yes sorry elephant.. your right my bad

But not related to Tesla Motors, I believe.

No. Lol Nikola Tesla (the person himslf) invented ac. Other have explained the rest.. Tesla motors has both edison and tesla rolling in their graves. "Tesla" branded car running on DC. Lol

more ups for you then.

Hot Dog!

I tested it and it was just 50 times more.

Jet Aircraft power hertz more than that. 400 times more to be exact. Ask me how I know.

Guust that's a good one

Oh. That was you. Thanks, mate! Still working fine every morning.

i am pretty sure prostitute came first, ;)

It only took a week to get them up to code? Surely some of the sparkies (usually those with a union buddy) went for a bludge halfway through...

yea, but she was fakin' it!