Make Your Own Lightning Kit

Had enough of the dry dreary schematics and theories? Take a look at how we threw together some thunder and lightning simulation kits.

The astute reader will recognize that some aspects of these rigs go against my own advice as to what makes good lightning. These compromises are usually done for reasons of convenience or cost. And everybody likes the result anyway. Perhaps my advice is too subtle.

Either way, it's pretty darn easy to throw together a nice lightning rig. You have no excuse to go without a lightning storm in your haunt!

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Lightning At Work

This is the lightning kit that Dennis put together to take to work.

The lights are controlled by the 13 Transylvania Ave lightning box.

This kit was assembled from:

This is intended to run off of the CD drive in the computer at work.

This cable plugs into a CD player and sends the sound to two RCA jacks. We only need one of them to plug into the lightning machine.

This adapter lets you take the output of the CD player and send it to both the lightning machine and amplified speakers.

 

Otter's Lightning

Here's a lightning kit that Dennis threw together for the Otter.

The lights are controlled by a 3-channel color organ by Velleman.

This unit has a built-in microphone, so it doesn't need cables to connect to the CD player.

This kit was assembled from:

This is intended to run off of a CD player "boom box".

The modified "cube" current taps serve two purposes: (a) they let you plug more than one lamp into each color organ output, and (b) this particular color organ does not have polarized output sockets so you can't plug in a light fixture with one blade wider than the other. The modified cubes have two thin blades that fit the color organ side, but polarized sockets to plug into.

 

Related Pages

You may be interested in these related pages:

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