Wild Card Wednesday

The 'Shock Watch' -- A Portable High-Voltage Capacitor Bank

An Early Prototype of the Device Built into a Glove

Over the past year or so, I created many small-scale electrical circuits and prototypes that led to the conceptualization of a device that uses only the energy of a single double-A battery to power tazers, railguns, coilguns, and EMPs. This project finally reached fruition over Winter break. I give you the Shock Watch -- a wrist-mounted gadget capable of outputting a 330 Volt pulse of electricity.

You may be wondering how the low voltage of a AA battery (which is about 1.5 V) powers something over 200 times more powerful than itself. The answer is a cylindrical electrical component called a capacitor. Think of a capacitor as a rechargeable battery that produces a really big current for a very short time. While a regular battery can keep a low-energy circuit (such as a small bulb or LED) running for hours, a capacitor does the inverse -- it runs out of power in a fraction of a second, but can power something much greater.

One of the 330 Volt Capacitors

A charging circuit does what the name suggest: it charges the capacitor. The AA current flows through a step-up transformer -- a component that raises voltage -- and sends the energy into the capacitor until it's full. It then connects to an appliance just as a battery would, sending its electrical current through the appliance.

To make a stronger device, I hooked up eight capacitors in parallel to make what's called a capacitor bank -- a bank that holds eight times the energy of one capacitor and releases it all at once. I then wired three charging circuits together to charge the cap bank more quickly. After adding an 'on/off' switch and a 'start charging' switch, I only had to connect the output wires.

An Example of the Output Power -- Now That's a Spark!

 

I put it all together into a nice little watch-like shape, added a wrist strap, and finally it was complete. I can connect the output wires to whatever I want to power -- a tazer, a strong strobe light, an EMP -- anything that requires a high voltage pulse of energy to work. The coolest part is the ability to power these things from my wrist, with the room to make add-on attachments. Perhaps the next addition will be a wrist-mounted railgun!

The Finished Product, Lit-Up Like a Christmas Tree

Look for future posts about some of the technology I mentioned in this article. I plan to talk about railguns, coilguns, EMPs, and more -- maybe with some demonstrations of the Shock Watch's capabilities!