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Small Electric Fence Charger

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Solar/battery powered, large enough for a *small* fence i.e. 50ft, not 10000 like most chargers. These would be really useful e.g. when keeping animals away from a single fruit tree. Commercial chargers are just too big/expensive for these usages which I think would be very frequent if the charger were available.
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Yet to be Fufilled
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Submitted by steve.steiner on December 4, 2017 - 4:31am.

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rpbcacueaiibh's picture
Submitted by rpbcacueaiibh on September 7, 2019 - 9:01pm

I've designed one, and successfully tested it, but there's are several problem with small size, and cost... (I only mean fence charger, no solar stuff, and/or batteries included!) 1. 10uF polypropylene caps for high voltage(450V) as well as flyback transformers, etc. are large in size and not cheap. My entire circuit(with SMD parts) was smaller, and cheaper then 1 capacitor... 2. I accidentally put the sparking end about only 10cm (5") away from the circuit board, and the EMP emitted by the discharge was strong enough that it fried it's own mosfets... You simply can't put it too close, or it's gonna self destruct... 3. If you wanna produce it you can't scavenge parts from here and there like when you DIY stuff, cause availability, and compatibility is gonna be a problem, so you have to go with parts that you can buy...
Submitted by steve.steiner on September 8, 2019 - 6:17am

I'd love to see what you came up with even if it didn't work out. Any idea what the one-off cost was? I wonder if a simple Faraday cage (shield) could (almost) completely eliminate the EMP issue? Thanks for getting back to me! Steve
rpbcacueaiibh's picture
Submitted by rpbcacueaiibh on March 11, 2020 - 8:02am

I was working on it and still am, cause my father sponsored it. :) Managed to reduce the size considerably, and make it more flexible, and potentially twice as powerful compared to my first proof of concept. True it's 4th circuit, and 3rd actually made on PCB... Still not finished, but I'm getting close to releasing it. :) Some pictures: Circuit bottom view: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cNpg6N6pdYTfZ7HXWRQpgAxRP2Ws7bgP/view?usp=sharing Assembled: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17LX3NFOOhAj6di4v4xZMEOt_xk1OMtaj/view?usp=sharing Another view: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kKaC05aMi20vsUW6IJeAzDBDtFs-mvnH/view?usp=sharing and another: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pAxsH2z9K3vJQ4nKe03HwcxHhwW-bKV_/view?usp=sharing And here's a Rev B screenshot just for the dimensions(now I'm at Rev C, this one is older, but the dimensions are the same.): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-aAz7D9BFqrhqgO0-tSOmhS1Nsl8-lCX/view?usp=sharing This is not released yet, there's still work to do on the programming and documentation side, but the hardware is final. Will post it here as well when I'm done. :)