The Railgun 2 is the sequel of the first railgun that Sam Barrow presented on his website, the Powerlabs. A railgun is a linear magnetic accelerator, a device that can basically fire any small metallic object at an incredible speed, using a huge amount of electrical power.

The objective of this railgun is to, as stated on the railgun 2 page, to

successfully design and construct a linear electromagnetic accelerator capable of accelerating a lightweight payload to velocities greater than 1000m/s so that hypervelocity erosion in the rail/armature interface can be studied and a means for minimizing this erosion be investigated.

The railgun 2 is the result of 3 years of research on the subject. From what I have understood, it works by first accelerating the projectile with compressed gas, then it accelerates it more using a very strong magnetic field generated by the mean of electricity.

If you want to learn more, run to Sam's Powerlabs railgun 2 page !

The photo in this post is from the Powerlabs website and is published here with Sam's kind permission.

Mike's Electric stuff is a website mostly full of crazy high-voltages projects. Mike is a freelance electronic engineer that usually design low power microcontroller-based devices... but in his spare time, he likes to play with various high-voltage things. When playing with some high-voltage generator, he invented a new musical instrument: the spark-o-phone was born.

This interesting device uses some resonant tubes and a high-voltage generator. When an electric discharge, a spark, is done in one of the tubes, the latter starts resonating and produces some sound in a certain frequency, determined by its length, its diameter, and other physical parameters. By controlling in which tube the discharge is done and when, some interesting musical patterns can be done. The results are promising, however I think that Mike should hire a compositor

Read more on the Spark-o-phone webpage on Mike's electric stuff. Do not hesitate to browse this website, as it was quite hard to choose what to publish here !