My curiosity has always gotten me into trouble.

Every day on my way to elementary school, I dozily gazed at the high voltage power lines near my house. How did electricity work? It had to be magic. In Kindergarten, I tested my theory, sticking both ends of an unbent paperclip in a wall socket. Sparks flew. I burned my hand—a born engineer.

Fascination with electricity never stopped. By the time I reached middle school, my desk had devolved into a jumbled playground of circuit boards, copper wire, and a conglomerate of electrical components. I spent hours tinkering, fashioning, and circuit-hacking projects to life. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to pursue Nikola Tesla's vision of a wirelessly connected world.

Harnessing wireless energy.

My freshman year of high school, I began experimenting with simple induction systems and incorporating passive tank circuits to improve transmission distances.

I spent a few months redesigning the circuit topology for higher wattage throughput. It was based on what is known as the Mazzili flyback transformer driver, which was actually a very popular choice among Tesla coil and other high voltage hobbyists at the time. By making a few small modifications—namely, replacing the flyback transformer with a small inductor and using a single loop of copper for the transmitting coil to minimize characteristic impedance—the result was an extremely robust system. I was able to achieve over 10W of power delivery with 30cm of separation.

I eventually got the idea to send bits of information through the transmitter by incorporating a switching mechanism to pulse power delivery. With a filtering rectifier, I was able to get a decent square wave.

My final design was based off of a resonant sine-wave Royer oscillator variant, skewing away from Mazzili's topology. Rather than using benchtop components, parts were specifically chosen to maximize resonant frequency and tuned accordingly.

If you're interested, you can check out the full technical writeup.

My (questionable) Tesla coil.

Using a spare neon-sign transformer, a bank of high voltage capacitors from Mouser, and some copper refrigerator tubing, I managed to hack together this Tesla coil in a couple weeks. The result isn't pretty, but it was very fun to make.