line drawing

stackable plate capacitor

Playing around with capacitor designs.

• white = dielectric
• orange = positive plate
• blue = negative plate

This made me think about a capacitor as an architectural structure. Could a parking garage conceivably be converted into a massive capacitor, large enough to store the energy from a lightning strike? I guess as long as steel rods were not embedded in the structural concrete. I don't know what the insulating properties of concrete are, but I am assuming that the concrete could be mixed specifically for this purpose.

Here I smoothed the out the corners so as to lessen chances of breakout if these were to be employed for very high voltages. Looks pretty much like the plate design from a lead acid battery. To improve capacitance even further the plates should have a large a surface area like a sponge.

Depending on the application the materials can change but the initial design can most likely stay the same.

capacitive sense pads

Some track pads removed from various devices. I removed these to get a sense of the different design configurations of track pads. Next is to get my hands on a Wacom tablet. Guess what the middle one is.

QT113-D Touch Sensor

Bread boarded circuit for touch sensor.

A capacitance sense touch pad for 48 keys. I forget what chip it is. This is probably my finest etch with breakout traces at 1/32 inch, and my first attempt at mounting a surface mount component.

Leyden jar

Here is a small Leyden jar, without its outer conductor, and filled with glass spheres.