Photo credit: Pode Coet
Electric arc lighters use a spark to create a plasma conduit between electrodes, which is then maintained by a lower voltage. The arc is then applied to a flammable substance to cause ignition, but this person has managed to modify one to play The Imperial March. “There’s an unidentified microcontroller inside this unit, which we’ll be replacing with a pin-compatible microcontroller (PIC12F1840) running our own code. The code drives the transformer using complementary PWM waveforms at ~15.6KHz to generate an arc, just like the previous microcontroller. It then modulates the waveform (and hence the arc) at audio frequencies to generate a tune without the need of a speaker/buzzer,” said PodeCoet. Click to view the first image in today’s viral picture gallery. Continue reading for the five most popular viral videos today, including one of “The World of the Jetsons, Reimagined”.