Auto testing bulbs

[Acetronics2]

Hi,

"the smallest bulbs i have are 0.15A. Should that be "10-15 turns divided by amps"?"

simple: 10 - 15 / 0.15 = ... 70 to 105 Turns.

... Take care for bending Reed bulbs wires ... always use a pair of pliers not to stress the glass !!!

Alain

[The Master]

I know. Ive broken pleanty of them as a kid. They make the wires really thick and strong too! Thanx for clearing up the formula confusion. I cant find any coils on Rapid that would do the job or even be modified to do the job. Im going to have to make my own so i suppose winding it around the reed switch itself would work. Is there any specific type of wire i should use? Ive got a few different kinds out of old transformers and motors etc

[The Master]

Luciano, Its more about the game really but i know a lot of pinball machines have patterns (mainly in attract mode) that turn on all the lights at the same time. I was going to buy a transformer from Rapid to handle all the bulbs. The one im looking at is 100VA 6V+6V. I was planning to use both of the secondaries to drive the 6V bulbs (split them evenly) and use both together for the 12V bulbs. As far as i understand 100VA means 100W so i should get about 8.3A at 12V. If i only think about the 6V bulbs then i should be able to get 16.6A by using both secondaries for 6V. That gives me about 110 bulbs which is about right for the small ones. There will be a few bigger ones on too and possibly some inverters for EL wire etc.

The idea was to program it so it cant turn on too many lights. I made that mistake before with an old transformer i had laying around. I dont think that was very powerfull though. I did also test an ATX PSU but it didnt work very well at all. Just a few lights at a time seemed to short it out but it was fine on the other transformer (till i tried to turn all the lights on). It could still have been a faulty PSU though. I have a few more laying around now so i might connect some bulbs into it when i get home and see how it goes