PPA – powering up the Personal Particle Accelerator

So, you’ve either built your Personal Particle Accelerator and completed the commissioning tests, or purchased a ready-made unit.

Either way, you’re keen to turn it on and show those Higgs Bosons who’s the boss… here’s what you do now:

  1. Review the safety advice
  2. Connect and turn on the power supply.  Use between 12V and 20V DC.  The PPA’s minimum power requirements are 12V DC, with current draw about 2 Amps, which can be supplied by a cheap laptop power supply.  To ensure top performance, and provide opportunities for experimentation and optimisation, an ideal power supply would be a laboratory (variable) power supply covering the range 12-20V DC at 3 Amps.  Do not supply more than 20V DC to the Personal Particle Accelerator.  Protection against incorrect polarity is provided by means of a power diode on the Output board PCB.
  3. Turn on the Enable toggle switch.  The enable switch is ON when the second-from-the-end LED is glowing.  Your unit should look something like the photo below (note: the unit in the photo has the vacuum pump electrically but not pneumatically connected)

    Note the illuminated second-from-the-end Enable led indicator is ON.
  4. Identify the rotational direction.   Each electromagnet must have an IRPS before it to supply timing data.  In the photo above, the rotational direction is clockwise.
  5. Choose a side of the PPA which you can easily swing your arm to initiate ball movement.  The selected side should be as obstruction free as possible – that is, a side which doesn’t include the end-joiner, and only have a single IRPS module on it.  In the photo above, the right hand side would be an appropriate side for a right handed person to use.
  6. Hold the provided neodymium magnet alongside the middle of the selected side, and gently tilt the unit so the ball slowly rolls past the selected side. Once the ball is attracted to the magnet, move the ball to the beginning (ie. start of the rotational direction) of the selected side.  Grip the tube lightly with your spare hand.  With a quick swipe of the magnet over the length of the selected side, start the ball rolling, and it should quickly achieve full speed.  The video below shows the motion at 0:45

If you haven’t got rotational motion, please see the section on debugging

 

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