**DIY Fog Machine: A Spooky Halloween Project**

As Halloween approaches, many of us are looking for creative ways to add a spooky atmosphere to our celebrations. In this article, we'll take a look at a DIY fog machine project that's perfect for creating a mysterious and eerie ambiance.

The project involves building a device that uses a piezoelectric disc to create an oscillation, which is then used to generate fog. The process begins with the identification of the components needed for the project. These include a PMS150C microcontroller, a 555 timer IC, a MOSFET driver (TC404), and two MOSFETs.

The first step in building the DIY fog machine is to create an oscillation using the piezoelectric disc. This involves connecting the disc to a capacitor and an inductor, which are then connected to a power source. The resulting oscillation has a frequency of 113 kilohertz, which is ideal for creating mist through mechanical vibrations of the disc.

However, the microcontroller being used in this project cannot get close to the resonance frequency required for the piezoelectric disc. This limitation leads to an oscillation voltage that only lies between plus and minus 70 volts, resulting in a relatively small amount of fog being produced.

To overcome this limitation, the next step is to use a MOSFET driver with the MOSFETs to recreate the oscillator circuit featured in commercial solutions. By using a 220 microhenry inductor and a 100 nano farad capacitor, the resulting oscillation has peaks of plus 18 and minus 40 volts, which is suitable for creating more fog.

The final step involves building up a 555 timer circuit to create the 113 kilohertz signal without the function generator. This simplifies the overall design and allows for easier modification and fine-tuning of the oscillator to its resonance frequency.

**The Complete DIY Fog Machine Circuit**

Once all the components are soldered onto a piece of veroboard, the entire circuit is placed inside a pumpkin to create a spooky Halloween display. The resulting fog machine produces a significant amount of mist that can be used to create a mysterious and eerie atmosphere.

In conclusion, building a DIY fog machine using a piezoelectric disc and a 555 timer IC is a fun and creative project that's perfect for Halloween celebrations. With a few simple components and some basic electronics knowledge, you can create a spooky fog effect that will add an extra layer of mystery to your Halloween display.

**Resources**

* Schematic diagram: [insert link]

* Pictures of the soldered circuit: [insert link]

* More information: [insert video description]

We hope this DIY project inspires you to get creative and add some spooky ambiance to your Halloween celebrations. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe for more DIY projects and tutorials!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ensince Halloween is slowly approaching I got myself a pumpkin emptied its guts and tried covering it's a more or less a scary-looking face but simply placing small tea lights inside ads and be done with it is certainly not exciting enough for me as an electronics enthusiasts that is why I got myself this so called ultrasonic mist maker which after powering it with 24 volts and placing it inside a container of water does create some intriguing looking mists and by adding this effect to my pumpkin it looks a lot more spooky now you can get such an ultrasonic mist maker wait a minute I already produce this video for Halloween 2017 in which I not only explained how such a device works but also terribly failed at creating a DIY version and basically told everyone to just buy the commercial solution so why is an ultrasonic mist maker once again the subject of attention well the reason is that I recently found a new ultrasonic mist maker circuits that not only works flawlessly as well but more importantly it does not hide its circuitry like other products do so in this video let's reverse engineer this new mist maker circuits in order to create our own super simple DIY version which this time will turn out as a success let's get started this video is sponsored by jl CPC be one piece of news about them jl CPC beer has now widely cuts their prices for one to six layer PCBs betch PCBs and stencils upload your Gerber files to other high quality PCBs for ridiculously low prices to start off let's solder wires to the voltage input pins of the circuits hook up the piezo electric disc and connect these circuits to 12 volt power as you can see you in the standby States these circuits only draws around nine milli amps and obviously it does not rate the mists while the disc is placed in water but by pressing these circuits tactile switch once the current flow fires up to 180 millions NT piezo electric disk dust without the mists when correctly positioned inside the water but make sure that it is does not oscillates when being dry because it seems to permanently damage it now granted the mist effect of these new circuits is not a spectacular as the effects of the old circuit from a year ago but then again this new circuits in comparison to the old one to us less power costs less does not make such mess and most importantly it uses a resonance frequency of only 113 kilo Hertz instead of 1.7 mega Hertz which is way easier to achieve but let's firstly inspect the ICS and components on the PCB to understand how the circuit works the first ICEA is a mc34063 which is a step up / down switching regulator in combination with a couple of passive complementary components and most importantly a Schottky diodes and an inductor on the other side it turns the 3.7 volts to 12 volts input voltage into a constant 20 eight votes output voltage this voltage is then stepped down to five volts through the 7h lo5 linear voltage regulator in order to supply the last I see whose label was unfortunately scraped off but after probing all of its pins it seems like it's only function is outputting a PWM signal with a frequency of 105 kilo hertz and soon as detect light switch is pushed since this frequency is not quite the 113 kilo hertz resonance frequency the disk ideally requires I came to the conclusion that the ICEA is a cheap chinese microcontroller whose timer was not able to get closer to the resonance frequency it could be for example a PMS 150 C with the 16-bit timer that you can get for staggeringly low three point five cents but nevertheless this PWM signal controls the gates of fq d r2 n sixty CEO and channel mass vents that whippet source is connected to ground its drain however is connected to 100 nano farad capacitor at 328 mu Henry inductor and the piezo electric disc like it shown in this schematic this part of the circuits basically creates an oscillation for the piezo electric disk which after checking its waveform on the oscilloscope seems to feature a maximum of 36 volts and a minimum of minus 78 volts which apparently is suitable to create the mist through mechanical vibrations of the disk and just like that we are familiar with the functional principle of the commercial solution and we learned that our DIY solution basically only needs to be able to create an alternating current flow through the disk near its resonance frequency for prototyping I utilized my function generator to create D 113 kilohertz square wave voltage now believe it or not beside the signal parts we only require those two components the first one is a TC for four to eight Juliet rival and the second one is a 470 nanofarad capacitor to decouple the IC now the output of the MOSFET driver basically consists of two MOSFETs that either pull the output high or low and since we got two outputs whose state is also inverted we can basically abus'd as I see you as a crude H bridge to let the alternating current flow so I connected the IC e to the power signal and disc like it's shown in this schematic and fired up my 15 volts power source as you can see here the discus create the mist but not a whole lot of its the reason is that our oscillation voltage only lies between plus minus 70 volts much less than before and increasing the input voltage is only possible up to 18 volts since that is the limits of the IC so for your quick mist fix this circuit works just fine but for a bit more power we can use the MOSFET driver properly year with the MOSFETs in order to recreate the oscillator circuits that was featured in the commercial solution I went with a 220 McRae new inductor and 100 nano farad capacitor and as you can see after powering the circuits will 15 volts the disc starts spitting out a bit more mist and by having a look at the voltage once again on the oscilloscope we can see a more powerful oscillation with peaks of plus 18 and minus 40 volts and of course with this MOSFET circuits we can also easily increase the voltage to a higher value to complete the circuits I built up a 555 timer circuits in order to create the 113 kilohertz signal without the function generator and also got rid of the MOSFET driver I see since the ne555 features enough output power to handle that on its own and after I did a final test of the circuits it was time to remove all of the components from the bread ports and solder them more permanently onto a piece of purports according to my final a schematic in case you want to recreate this DIY route then you can find the schematic along with pictures of my soldered circuits as a reference and more information in the video description and as soon as my circuits was completes I fine-tuned the oscillator to the resonance frequency and finally placed the whole circuits inside my pumpkin and with that being done I wish you a spooky Halloween and if you enjoyed this video then as always don't forget to Like share and subscribe stay creative and I will see you next timesince Halloween is slowly approaching I got myself a pumpkin emptied its guts and tried covering it's a more or less a scary-looking face but simply placing small tea lights inside ads and be done with it is certainly not exciting enough for me as an electronics enthusiasts that is why I got myself this so called ultrasonic mist maker which after powering it with 24 volts and placing it inside a container of water does create some intriguing looking mists and by adding this effect to my pumpkin it looks a lot more spooky now you can get such an ultrasonic mist maker wait a minute I already produce this video for Halloween 2017 in which I not only explained how such a device works but also terribly failed at creating a DIY version and basically told everyone to just buy the commercial solution so why is an ultrasonic mist maker once again the subject of attention well the reason is that I recently found a new ultrasonic mist maker circuits that not only works flawlessly as well but more importantly it does not hide its circuitry like other products do so in this video let's reverse engineer this new mist maker circuits in order to create our own super simple DIY version which this time will turn out as a success let's get started this video is sponsored by jl CPC be one piece of news about them jl CPC beer has now widely cuts their prices for one to six layer PCBs betch PCBs and stencils upload your Gerber files to other high quality PCBs for ridiculously low prices to start off let's solder wires to the voltage input pins of the circuits hook up the piezo electric disc and connect these circuits to 12 volt power as you can see you in the standby States these circuits only draws around nine milli amps and obviously it does not rate the mists while the disc is placed in water but by pressing these circuits tactile switch once the current flow fires up to 180 millions NT piezo electric disk dust without the mists when correctly positioned inside the water but make sure that it is does not oscillates when being dry because it seems to permanently damage it now granted the mist effect of these new circuits is not a spectacular as the effects of the old circuit from a year ago but then again this new circuits in comparison to the old one to us less power costs less does not make such mess and most importantly it uses a resonance frequency of only 113 kilo Hertz instead of 1.7 mega Hertz which is way easier to achieve but let's firstly inspect the ICS and components on the PCB to understand how the circuit works the first ICEA is a mc34063 which is a step up / down switching regulator in combination with a couple of passive complementary components and most importantly a Schottky diodes and an inductor on the other side it turns the 3.7 volts to 12 volts input voltage into a constant 20 eight votes output voltage this voltage is then stepped down to five volts through the 7h lo5 linear voltage regulator in order to supply the last I see whose label was unfortunately scraped off but after probing all of its pins it seems like it's only function is outputting a PWM signal with a frequency of 105 kilo hertz and soon as detect light switch is pushed since this frequency is not quite the 113 kilo hertz resonance frequency the disk ideally requires I came to the conclusion that the ICEA is a cheap chinese microcontroller whose timer was not able to get closer to the resonance frequency it could be for example a PMS 150 C with the 16-bit timer that you can get for staggeringly low three point five cents but nevertheless this PWM signal controls the gates of fq d r2 n sixty CEO and channel mass vents that whippet source is connected to ground its drain however is connected to 100 nano farad capacitor at 328 mu Henry inductor and the piezo electric disc like it shown in this schematic this part of the circuits basically creates an oscillation for the piezo electric disk which after checking its waveform on the oscilloscope seems to feature a maximum of 36 volts and a minimum of minus 78 volts which apparently is suitable to create the mist through mechanical vibrations of the disk and just like that we are familiar with the functional principle of the commercial solution and we learned that our DIY solution basically only needs to be able to create an alternating current flow through the disk near its resonance frequency for prototyping I utilized my function generator to create D 113 kilohertz square wave voltage now believe it or not beside the signal parts we only require those two components the first one is a TC for four to eight Juliet rival and the second one is a 470 nanofarad capacitor to decouple the IC now the output of the MOSFET driver basically consists of two MOSFETs that either pull the output high or low and since we got two outputs whose state is also inverted we can basically abus'd as I see you as a crude H bridge to let the alternating current flow so I connected the IC e to the power signal and disc like it's shown in this schematic and fired up my 15 volts power source as you can see here the discus create the mist but not a whole lot of its the reason is that our oscillation voltage only lies between plus minus 70 volts much less than before and increasing the input voltage is only possible up to 18 volts since that is the limits of the IC so for your quick mist fix this circuit works just fine but for a bit more power we can use the MOSFET driver properly year with the MOSFETs in order to recreate the oscillator circuits that was featured in the commercial solution I went with a 220 McRae new inductor and 100 nano farad capacitor and as you can see after powering the circuits will 15 volts the disc starts spitting out a bit more mist and by having a look at the voltage once again on the oscilloscope we can see a more powerful oscillation with peaks of plus 18 and minus 40 volts and of course with this MOSFET circuits we can also easily increase the voltage to a higher value to complete the circuits I built up a 555 timer circuits in order to create the 113 kilohertz signal without the function generator and also got rid of the MOSFET driver I see since the ne555 features enough output power to handle that on its own and after I did a final test of the circuits it was time to remove all of the components from the bread ports and solder them more permanently onto a piece of purports according to my final a schematic in case you want to recreate this DIY route then you can find the schematic along with pictures of my soldered circuits as a reference and more information in the video description and as soon as my circuits was completes I fine-tuned the oscillator to the resonance frequency and finally placed the whole circuits inside my pumpkin and with that being done I wish you a spooky Halloween and if you enjoyed this video then as always don't forget to Like share and subscribe stay creative and I will see you next time