Some time ago I saw a cool blog post on Gizmodo about a steampunk “Tesla Cane” where the creator, Virtuoso Datamancer, had designed a cane with a Tesla theme. Later I say pics on Flickr from one someone else had made.
I thought the idea was pretty cool but had no reason to pursue making one.
With the steampunk wedding in the future, I now had a real reason to make one!
With the advice (and probably some construction help) from the guys at work (one is an Electrical Engineer and the other is one of the heads of the robotics club) this is going to be pretty fantastic!
So far, I’ve ordered the Plasma Ball: a 3″ USB powered one from Amazon ($10). Its a little hard to tell from the description, but it may also be powered by 4 AA batteries (1.5v x 4 =6v, USB supplies 5v)…if not, it won’t be hard to convert the ball to running off batteries. The guys at the office want to use rechargable batteries so we can seal them in the cane!
The ball should arrive in a couple of days, then to (carefully!) disable it to see what needs to be modified.
I also need to find a cane body, either a wood cane (maybe a sword cane so its already hollow?) or a brass/copper tube.