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Nice video, as I worked with coilguns a lot for my university project, I might give you some advice which will definitely help you. 1.try using some kind of ferrite washer caps at the both wnds of each coil, to help focusing the magnetic field. 2.the main issue and also misunderstanding about your design is that theoretically adding more stages to the design won't increase the speed. Here is why: as the bullet passes through the stages it gains more speed, thus the required run time of each coil will be different.the early stages need more run time thus bigger inductance and capacitor values, and the few last stages will have a lot less run time due to the high speed of the bullet, so you should use smaller values of inductors and capacitors values. If you apply the same values to each stage, adventually the last stages will reduce the speed and efficiency of the coilgun drastically, because of the suck back effect that they cause due to exceeding the required run time of the coil. 3.try to minimize the airgap between the bullet and the barrel, aslo use non-conductive barrel to get rid of induced current losses. 4. The pcb traces add a noticable amount of resistance to the current path, so using a thicker and wider trackes covered with solder is a better choice. 5.calculate the values for the capacitor and inductor of each stage based on the bullet speed of the previous stage. 6.try using a stepped coil geometry for the coil of the first stage. These were all I can say so far about it. Again, thanks for your efforts and keep it going!

Great design! Make it into a loop and you have a mini particle accelerator.

What a nice project! When I was in the U.S. Navy in 1954, I was assigned to a Degaussing range on an island in Rhode Island. I learned a lot about magnetics, and sketched up a coil gun using magnetic bullets, not iron ones. I never built it but this project here brought back some great memories!

Amazing! Looks like a really fun build. I like the simplicity of being able to scale it up.

Very nice video. Would love to see how many stages optimizes/maximizes speed. Might also be useful as a warning of its danger if you tested it on ballistic gel at some point.

i love both coil and rail guns in the diy space. both have their own drawbacks and pros but in the end are very fun to play with.

Perhaps using timing rather than photo sensors would mean more tunability. This would be more complicated because each projectile must be the same, but it could go supersonic this way :)

Great video, great version of a coilgun! right now, I'm in the proces of building a Coilgun myself for a schoolproject and if there is one thing I can tell you, it is to make it a blind system, that is just controlled by an arduino or ESP. As you probably know, the magnetic field doesn't immediatly break down, when you cut the power. I used Phototransistors to get the speed and adjusted the coil timing this way.

Nice. I've always wanted to make one where you can just attach more segments to the end ever since I knew how they worked but didn't have the sanity for a project like that. Looks great!

Wow I jut saw this! So much power!

This video takes me back to when I built something similar to your design and it worked perfectly. I only used 6 stages but it was so fast when firing a small projectile through similar materials used in this video. Well done.😊

I have some improvements in mind: 1) Use a Teflon tube, as you suggested it creates less friction 2) Use hall effect sensors instaead of phototransistors, they are more reliable and require less space on the pcb 3) Make the boards' interconnects hot-swappable and not soldered

It's good to see some new videos on this topic! I am currently designing my own multi stage modular coil gun design with optical triggers. I have designed it with fire control for single burst and auto. I can't wait to get to the prototyping stage. I almost have all my components for testing.

Woaw, it is indeed powerful. Impresive how it can pass through the prefab board! And the design is very modular and simple, I love the idea. Just wanna see more videos on this project :)

Within 17 seconds of watching this video I had to subscribe, this is litterly the type of content I enjoy. I really don't know how I haven't came across your videos earlier.

The bullet detector had to be done before the coil. The resulting values would be: 1 - bullet to the coil, 0 bullet began to fly into the coil, 1 bullet flew into the coil. And after 1 -> 0 -> 1 turn on the next coil.

After studying his schematics, it appears that when the projectile breaks the IR beam it triggers the Thyristor of the next coil in the chain (note: the next coil circuit is drawn to the left of the IR trigger components - schematics should have a left to right flow when possible), but it DOES NOT cut off the coil that fed that IR pair. Once a coil's Thyristor is triggered, each coil is rapidly energized and then rapidly de-energized until the capacitor is nearly fully drained (note: the diode above the capacitor is an isolation diode so each capacitor discharge is independent from each other - that is good), but each coil in succession is not turned off as he says in this video, they are just drained to zero at their own rate after triggered and thus that reduces the acceleration efficiency of the system. The idea is to have the field at zero as it transitions roughy midway between one stage to the next. Timing here is very critical, if the coil de-energizes even a microsecond too early or too late, the net acceleration between stages is lower than optimum - optimum is what you need. Also I said 'roughly' between stages because that midway point might actually be somewhere within the feeding coil before passing to the accepting coil in the next stage. So exactly when and how fast one coil's magnetic field reacts (Gauss curve), it must properly overlap with the next stage's coil Gauss curve and timing. Each stage will have different timing and curves. Also, as you can see in the video, IR phototransistors have very slow response times, too slow for the pinpoint timing required for efficient acceleration. I think Hall Effect transducers would be better, but the coil fields would interfere with them and the projectile would have to be magnetized. This system is a simple rail gun, Rail Guns use pre-calculated ballistic expectations of the projectile and the system for the best results - no real-time monitoring of the projectile is used. A high speed FPGA with nanosecond timing using DLLs could get the right timing for each coil stage once a solution for the interstage ballistics is found.

that is really amazing as you have explained everything in detail and with the help of animation

Lots of work! Great job in documenting your project!

This is a very nice design! I like your way of making the stages modular, so you can just add more stages. You need a way to increase the capacitor discharge rate in the last stages where the velocity is higher. All you need to do is reduce the number of turns of each stage, so as stages get less turns they have less inductance and the magnetic field will be created faster and with more intensity (but less duration). Also, if you connect ALL the led sensors to a scope channel, you will see a series of pulses as the projectile triggers each sensor. That should allow you to calculate the acceleration for each stage, and help you to tune each stage by the number of turns on the coils. How many turns did you use in this prototype? Did you measure the inductance?

You should have placed the photo sensors at the front of the coil, instead of the back. Then set them to turn on the coils when the beam is blocked. The reason is that you would not need to have the coil on all the time and there will also be no pull back after the projectile has already reached past the half-way mark in the coil and starts to get a pull back effect. The coil would turn on when the projectile gets to the front of the opening and the coil will shut off when it reaches the mid-way point before any pull back happens.

This is the coolest tutorial for a coil gun that I've seen yet. Very educational and well done!

This is really awesome. Thanks for sharing all of this. I'm learning all I can about electronics as I dabble a bit for a hobby. I might try this project sometime. It looks fun

Very neat project! A tip on the soldering though as some of them look very poor. I recommend soldering with a medium thick chisel tip and with some more heat for much easier work and much better flow around the joints. it might sound odd that using a bigger tip would be better and might look harder with small parts but you can turn the tip so you get the sharper edge towards the surface which makes you easily apply solder on the flat surface of it and nicely flow on to the component. if you solder with leaded solder around 380 degree C or if lead free up to 400-420 if you have bigger heat absorbing areas (might sound hot for some but this is where I work all the time). a needle tip is weak in every aspect both in how much heat it can transfer and the amount of solder it can hold and it is more suited for smaller SMD work. But I am using chisel tip for pretty much everything. just mention this as creative feedback, keep up the good work!

Very neat project! Some thoughts for possible improvements: Since the bullet goes trough the later stages very fast it might be a good idea to switch to coils with lower inductance and capacitors with lower ESR (inner resistance) like foilcapacitors. That way you might be able to increase power output of those later stages to add noticeable energy to the projectile.

Fantastic build. Great job. Looks like a fun project.

I love your project and very happy with your simple details. Thank you

The moment i saw the clip of it shooting the projectile into the cardboard box, thats all i needed as proof you know what your doing, and subscribed. Lol. Awesome project. And its such a simple circuit. I love it. Simple, and straight forward. Will be building one down the road. Thanks for sharing your design and layout. On another note, i like your wall background with the motheboards. I have my workspace the same way. Got the idea from a video on Linus Tech. They did his office completely in motherboards on one wall. Painted it all in 1 color. I did the same, but added it couple ARGB light strips to glow from behind the boards onto the wall and using EL Wire, traced the mosfet heatsinks, and each boards shape to outline it like in the movie TRON. Turned out amazing. Maybe a idea for your wall? :)

Fascinating; I’m hooked on this concept. What about spacing the coils at increasing distance from each preceding one to use the inertia of the projectile and “catch” it at optimum position for the next coil ?

Excellent video. Well narrated, explained, filmed, and nice use of graphics. Doubt I would ever build one, but this is how electronic projects ought to be demonstrated on UKposts.

Looking forward to the cover!! Nice project!

Hello, and thanks for sharing this project. I have a couple of questions. I may have missed something, but as I look at the circuit it appears that crossing the IR beam triggers the coil rather than turning it off. This seems to be supported in that each additional module has the IR beam at the entry of the coil. Also, what is the white LED for?

BTW, running big high-discharge-current caps at a higher voltage than they're rated for (e.g., 500+VDC on a 450V cap) is a pretty good way to have one explode. Might want to dial back your coil voltage a bit.

Fantastic work sir. Please keep making more project videos. You are a true inspiration.

I am so glad I found your channel! Love your work.

If all the energy from every capacitor is discharged in the coil, you have 65 joules of energy with each stage. That's a lot of energy, for instance a 9mm round has arround 480 joules so you'd only need 7 stages to have that energy. Of course, is not a 100% efficient system but still, it's scary how powerful this thing can be.

I very much like the modularity :-) ... BUT your actual circuit works a bit different, than explained in the video: the IR-barrier is positioned in front of the coil. As soon as the projectile interrupts the IR-barrier, the thyristor is switched on and the capacitor is discharged via the coil with a very high current. At that time the projectile is attracted by the magnetic field, and pulled into the coil. When the projectile exits the coil, there is no active switching off, because a thyristor can't be actively switched off. However the discharge time won't take long - the capacitor is most likely empty, before the projectile exits the coil. But there is another issue with the circuit: the discharge current reaches its peak, when the voltage of the capacitor zero. Then the current starts decreasing and charges the capacitor in reverse (the bypass-diode D2 is useless). As soon as the current is zero, the thyristor is inactive again, and the capacitor is negatively charged. Reverse-charging an electrolytic capacitor is not a good idea: I strongly recommend to test the discharge-behavior with the oscilloscope (at a much lower voltage), fix the circuit, use a high voltage mosfet (instead of the thyristor).

I love the fact that you can find how to make cool stuff like this so easily on youtube

Thank you for adding the captions. Always appreciate it.

Your channel is so underrated, i see other main stream youtubers have a go at this project and their results are subpar compared to yours. Yes you're using a more dangerous design that uses high voltage, but what isn't dangerous in these new times we live in. As always very good content and educational as usual.

The thyristor cannot be turned off (it keeps passing the current as long as the capacitor is charged) or am I missing something?

Thanks ALOT for this video m8, i really liked it. Hope one day to manage building one too.

so far i think this may be the best functioning coil gun on the internet so far!!

Nicely done the photo transistor is a far superior to the hall sensors used on other UKposts video coil guns. The one change I would consider would be put the photo transistor gate on the entry side of the coil. And use delay time for shutting off the coils in this way as the speed increases you can control the acceleration by time delay so the coil will shut off before the projectile makes it past the half way point.

Very nice work man!! You did a fantastic job! Not only at the project itself, but the video is extremely well made all around as well! Extra props on the safety warnings and explanations. You don't wanna a big cap incorrectly!! [ZAP!!!] Thanks!! It's kinda creepy because I was just wondering(internally) about what it would take to make one of these for a practical (non violent) application. Looks like it's too much unless they are available in kits and inexpensive. It was a off the wall thought, as many of mine can be thankfully.

Awesome video and project amigo!!!

Super für Frühlingsfest geeignet. Danke für den anderen Alltags - Einfall !

I like your solution for shutting off the magnetic field between stages. Cheap and effective. I was thinking about using a controller to time things accordingly, but I think that route is only necessary if you want to archive greater speeds with the projectile.

Very nice work, this is exactly the type of videos why I have subscribed to this channel :) I have just a few ideas: 1) It would be great to explain in the video why you have finally decided on thyristors rather than MOSFETs or IGBTs 2) Instead of using IR LED/phototransistor pairs, I'd go for already pre-made photo barriers - for example, the H2010 photo-interrupter has a 10mm spacing, so it would fit an 8mm tube perfectly ;) 3) Please, share also the EasyEDA project, not only the gerber files (I think there is an option in EasyEDA to make the project public) - if someone would like to make some adjustments or improvements to the PCB (to fit different components, etc.)

Woah! This is one of the most powerful ive seen and im guessing the projectile travels more force than the one made from hacksmith. Auto Subscribed!

This is cool. I love it ❤ Nice project

You could almost double the effectivness if you just reverse the magnetic field when you now shut it down. In this way both ends of the coil will pull/push the ammunition... Also if you do this, then shut stages off after next stages led detects it. And you could turn stage on after previous led detects it. These on/off switches saves some energy for the next round.

Owesome as always

WOW!!!! Fabulous project

You have done a great work!

I think this is a great project. It’s obvious that plenty of time and expense has been put into it. I see a lot of “armchair” engineers in the comments. There are always different and maybe better ways of doing things with electronics projects. Sometimes compromises need to be made to get most of the desired results. I feel this could be a fun thing to put together. I have already ordered the parts to make this project myself. Thank you for your time.

Maybe the photo diode can placed before the coil and use a timer to optimize the coil turn off time and trigger next coil turn on. As the bullet get progressively faster, the timer gets shorter for each stage.

You explain it very well that i could understand👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 great project

earned my subscription. I look forward to more videos. thank you sir

The modularization is a great idea and having a capacitor for each stage means that you get the best part of the cap discharge curve to drive the coil. The downside is that there is likely to be plenty of charge left in each cap after it got discharged into its respective coil. This is OK if you are going to repeatedly fire a projectile, though: just top the charge up to peak voltage and you are ready to go. Also, as the projectile speeds up, the distance between the coils and the optical sensors should increase. I think it is sheer luck that you achieved the muzzle speeds that you did (impressive!), but I think that adding more modules is unlikely to improve performance further. In this case, the best approach for the timing of each coil-fire to achieve maximum projectile-velocity can only be experimentally determined, given all the other vagaries in the design such as the steel barrel that interferes with the magnetic circuit, the effects of back-EMF from the coil + projectile, and the indeterminate magnetic properties of the projectile. I suggest the next design iteration should be computer-controlled using the optical sensors, to determine when to fire the next coil and also when to switch it off. This way, you can also determine the muzzle velocity (and also display it with the charge voltage). Also, consider using something like an EE-SX1070 optical slot sensor instead of pot-lucking the alignment of bending the wires of a discrete diode and IR sensor to line them up. Good luck and have fun!

Suggestion: try shooting it at a polycarbonate sheet next, it’s commonly used in bulletproof glass, as it’s quite impact resistant. You could even try a CD, DVD or BD, as they’re made of polycarbonate.

Solid vid, high quality content

beautifull project and also back ground thanks

It even had a freaking recoil ... how cool that'd look in a 3d printed case like a gun.

🙏🏼🇧🇷🌱👍 Muito obrigado pela oportunidade de aprender com seus vídeos. Obs: Seria interessante entre as bobinas colocar imã de neodímio para aumentar a energia cinética... Uma arma.

that is amazing. Impresive!

Thanks for sharing, such an inspiring projects...

Idea: If you use high Frequency AC where +ve & -ve cycles are synchronized with the speed of projectile. There wouldn't be a cutoff period in this case and resulting in 2x velocity with lesser coils.

If you put a sensor before each segment, you can then use a timer for each segment to turn off right at the center. You have to calibrate each one individually and measure the output velocity. But the good thing is, you can calibrate each in order and it won't affect the later segments. Just optimize stage by stage.

Let' ho start! Good project!

AMAZINGLY INFORMATIVE!!!! Thank you!

Nice work! If you want some ideas(be warned: I do it OFTEN!), I would suggest you the following: -Warn the people to NEVER stand in line with EITHER of the barrel' s side. Because if something weird happens in the control circuitry, the bullet could oscillate backwards as well, as you already told us. -You could put some of the extra boards under the others and just put the coils up with the other ones, using longer coil wires for those on the bottom row. So that the gun will have a shorter barrel, making use of the free space on it. That' s why you are gonna need some extra holes on every board, so that the coils of the PCBs on the bottom will go thru. Maybe some zig - zag pattern would be nice, as well. -If you shape the end of the bullets like the real ones, they will have better penetration and less friction with the air(obviously...), but if you also make them a bit twisted, you will have more accuracy. Either on the bullets themselves, or the barrel, like on the real guns. -The capacitors need to have a high-impedance resistor on their leads(each of the capacitors), in order to automatically and gradually discharge themselves, when the power goes off. And lastly, greetings from Greece!

Loading 450V caps to 500V? Cold joints? PCB traces clearance for high voltage? This project looks really safe xD

Fantastic idea and design.

Great explanation! I like the animations

Since the speed increases for each coil, until the theoretical maximum speed, I believe you'll eventually end up at a point where the projectile moves past a coil faster than the coil can turn off using the photoresistor. You could get around this by using a timed release mechanism instead, but that would be hard to make modular. The timing between each coil is [projectile acceleration] less than the previous timer, thus turning the coil off just when the projectile hits the middle point.

El problema que veo en este diseño es que los proyectiles no mantienen su orientación. Esto sucede porque al contrario de lo que pasa en las balas, tu proyectil no rota sobre sí mismo, y no hay nada que se resista a que vaya girando a lo loco. Creo que sí inventaras algún sistema que hiciera rotar el proyectil, el momento angular haría que se estabilizara en el vuelo

Nice job... Describing everything from start to finish, design of boards including support... Well done all around... Curious about using hall effect to sense location of bullet

Some comments to your great project. I like the modularity of your design. 1. Replacing Thyristors with Mosfets (and add propper Gate Driver) can also turn off the voltage. That can be usefull to avoid retraction of the protile. 2. Replacing the freewheeling diode with a TVS snubber will turn off current much faster. Or use a full bridge mosfet topology for better energy recovery. 3. I would place the detector circuit directly inside the coil. Then directly the current can be turned off. 4. The capacitors you choose have high esr. Maybe use a foil capacitor. At least they bang much better when shorted. 5. Did you experiment or calculate the inductance? From my feeling there must be an optimal one. 6. I would switch the design to pure smd as it would be more robust.

I swear I saw these exact schematics and designs in use on sites like aliexpress before this video was released. Did you design or reverse engineer these?

I appreciate the spiel at the beginning about capacitor safety, but I feel like you really could have put gun safety in there too. Bare minimum is trigger discipline, "the gun is always loaded", and "do not point it at anything you don't want to destroy".

your coil is slowing down the bullet. a transistor gate has a capacitance, a photoresistor has a delay. in the end, the fact that you have a photoresistor behind the coil slows down the bullet. put it in front of the coil, and put a delay relay, and for each coil, set your own delay on the oscilloscope, having data on the speed of the bullet passing through the tube.

Thanks It helped alot in my project.

would be interesting if you could measure/calculate the speed and the kinetic energy of the bullet

Question: How did you decide on the number of windings of each coil? At some point the speeding 'bullet' will cause a self induction in each coil that will counteract your generated induction.. Therefore, there will be a limit to the number of boards you can use...at some point the number of boards will not have any effect. That's why the number of windings on each coil is important. How did you deal with that?

Awesome project!

Another awesome , well presented video.

It seems to me that you can also use the PD to detect when to switch the polarity of the coil... that way you can use it to not only pull the projectile into it, but to also forcefully expel it to the next stage.

The projectile must be tipped with a non-ferrous material to trigger the sensor before the iron reaches the opposite magnetic field

Brilliant design 👌🏽🤩

SO amazing. Love it

Will it penetrate a 1/16 inch plate of Steel???

but MDF is like cardboard .. you can even bust it with your fist?

I like how you made it very beginner friendly

When you add more stages, it will lose efficiency each step. As the kinetic energy is proportional to the V^2. When you apply the same energy to the bullet, you'll gain less speed at each stage.

What you could do is add two pairs of infrared detectors at a fixed length, then measure the time it takes to cross them. With that, you could determine the speed of your bullet, and answer questions such as: Does the speed linearly increase when I add more stages? :)

Great job Keeps on You're my hero's

Nice work!

Can we make a big tank connon out of this ? I love the idea of 8.8cm flak electric gun on a tiger 1 tank 🥰