I wanted to build a spark gap transmitter—you know, for fun.  However, things didn’t start off so great.  Here is how it went down.

My first plan was to build this.

I like it, but it uses an ignition coil and some other thing.  However, check out the receiver.  That’s awesome.  It’s a coherer receiver (I think) and it basically detects a spark with those two bolts in the plastic sleeve.  There should be some iron filings or something in between the bolts.  When a spark is detected, the filings jump the gap and make it a conductor.  I’m not sure why the LED light is connected to a 9 volt battery though.

After that, I just did some google searches for spark gap transmitter and attempted to build the designs I saw.  None of them had capacitor values, so I just had to guess.  But they didn’t work.

I honestly thought I knew how to do this.  I tried a step up transformer with a capacitor.  Nope.  Actually, I was getting a spark on the battery side but not the step up voltage side.  How did I even pass physics courses?

Here is my attempt with a transformer.

Finally, I found a page that used an electromechanical bell.  That works.

I decided to build my own oscillator from scratch.

Homework (for me)

• Make this more solid (the connection to the steel plate is iffy.
• Could you replace the steel plate with a paperclip?
• Can you change the buzzing frequency by adding weights to the oscillating bar?
• Use a step up transformer to get BIGGER SPARKS.
• Build a coherer detector.

# MacGyver Season 3 Episode 5: Dia de Muertos + Sicarios + Family

Battery and Solar Powered Fridge

It’s not a big “hack” in the episode, but we see MacGyver walking through the build a refrigerator.  You could use solar power and a battery with a normal fridge, but there is also the peltier cooler option.  The peltier is a small solid state device – when you run current through it, one side gets hot and one side gets cold.  You can use this device to cool the inside of a fridge.  It’s not super efficient, but it’s very simple.

Actually, I started to build one (but I haven’t finished).  Here is my progress so far.

Modify boom box to pick up beacon signal

So, Oversight builds a homing beacon.  He sets the frequency to 457 kiolhertz.  MacGyver needs to modify the radio to pick up this frequency.  He needs to make the modification because a normal AM radio only goes down to about 540 kHz.

So, how do you change the tuning frequency of a radio?  Let’s look at a super basic radio (a crystal radio).

There are two parts to tuning a radio – there is the capacitor (above that would be the tube with the aluminum foil) and the inductor (the tube with the wire wrapped around it).  The radio will amplify the signal with the frequency that matches that of the inductor plus capacitor combo.  So, just change on of those and you can change the minimum frequency of the radio.

Shock vest

I love the parts where MacGyver and Oversight argue about physics stuff.  Here are some notes about their discussion.

• Does shortening the wires reduce the resistance?  Yes.  That’s true.
• You can get a shock by storing electrical charge in a capacitor – that is true (but most taser type things don’t do it that way).  More capacitors means more charge and more shock.

50 foot drop calculation

How fast would you be moving after a drop of 50 feet?  Let’s go over this calculation really quickly.  I hate imperial units, so I am going to switch to metric.  Since it’s about 3 feet per meter, 50 feet would be about 15 meters (rough approximation).

When an object falls, it has a constant acceleration of – 9.8 m/s^2 (assuming no air drag).  That means that for each second that it falls, it will increase its speed by 9.8 m/s.  We can write this as:

$-g = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t} = \frac{v_2 - v_1}{\Delta t}$

Since the falling object starts from rest, the initial velocity is zero.  We can then solve for the final velocity.  Oh, this is all in one dimension.

$v_2 = -gt$

Oh, I am assuming the initial time is also zero. But we don’t know the time the object falls.  Let’s look at the two definitions of average velocity:

$v_\text{avg} = \frac{v_1+v_2}{2} = \frac{\Delta y}{\Delta t}$

I can use this with the previous equation to eliminate time.

$v_2 = \frac{2\Delta y}{t}$

$t=\frac{-v_2}{g}$

$v_2 =\sqrt{-2g\Delta y}$

So, the change in y is -15 meters and let’s just say g = 10 m/s^2.  That puts the final velocity at the square root of 300 or about 17-18 m/s.  That’s like 40 miles per hour.

Fan motor as a brake

MacGyver lets a rope wrap around a spinning fan motor.  He then uses that to go down a building (not slow – but slower than falling).  Yes, this is plausible.  It would be better if the motor is on since then there will be a resistance to spinning it.

I could probably say more about this – but it would get complicated quickly.  Oh, how about this – a motor is the same as an electric generator.  It just depends on how you use it.