A joule thief is a self-oscillating voltage booster that is small, low-cost, and easy to build, typically used for driving small loads. This circuit is also known by other names such as joule ringer or blocking oscillator.
It can use nearly all of the energy in a single-cell electric battery, even far below the voltage where other circuits consider the battery fully discharged (or "dead"); hence the name, which suggests the notion that the circuit is stealing energy or "joules" from the source. The term is a pun on the expression "jewel thief": one who steals jewelry or gemstones.
The circuit is a variant of the blocking oscillator that forms an unregulated voltage boost converter. The output voltage is increased at the expense of higher current draw on the input, but the integrated (average) current of the output is lowered and brightness of a luminescence decreased.I have been playing around with this circuit for quite some time and I am very interested in it's applications, it is very simple to build and quite pleasant to watch the results.
Follow these instructions in order to build your own version, later on I will show you some cool experiments I have been working on, using a joule thief plus crystal radio, as well as a joule thief combined with another cool circuit that for the life of me I forget the name, but I came across it while researching Tesla cosmic energy collector. Basically this circuit allows current to be collected from an antenna and it runs forward using diodes and is ran into a capacitor which stores the charge. I have been quite successful in lighting leds.
Stay tuned
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