Piezo Crystal Formation Project Uploaded!

It’s not hard to build your own homemade piezo crystals! The Piezo Crystal Formation Project documents a successful attempt by my brother and I (plagiarism waver: mostly my brother!) to create some piezoelectric crystals out of potassium sodium tartrate, one of the oldest compounds known to exhibit piezoelectricity.

We managed to get about 50-60V generated across it when hitting it softly with the back of a screwdriver. Unfortunately we couldn’t get it to make any sound, this is probably harder to achieve due to getting the correct crystal shape (long and flat, I’m guessing) to make audible sound waves.

See the Piezo Crystal Formation Project page for more info…

A large homemade piezo crystal.

The voltage created when giving the piezo a large whack from the back-end of the screw driver.