Depends on Your Definition of Viral

Over the first weekend in March I had a bit of free time. I enjoy electronics, so I pulled out an old Snap Circuits kit I had as a kid and started playing around with it. I had the spring-pin connectors in the SC-750 edition, so I started plugging in random components I had from my electronics supplies and seeing what I could make them do.

One of the components was a little NE-2 neon indicator bulb that I had taken out of a broken electric blanket control. They take on the order of 80 volts to light up (it’s a gas discharge lamp), and I only had two Snap Circuits battery packs to power the whole thing with, so I put together a simple circuit using a relay and a transformer to step the voltage up. After fooling around with it for a bit I got the bulb to light.

I then fooled around with more of the circuits and came up with a second circuit. I’m not exactly sure what it is or how it works, but it was fun.

For some reason I then decided I wanted to post those circuits to YouTube. So I did:

For reference, before I posted these, my channel had only about 200 views total, 10 likes, no comments, and 4 subscribers (2 of which I knew personally).

I completely did not expect what happened next.

Within about two days, those two shorts had gained almost 10,000 views, 120 likes (and 15 dislikes), and 6 comments altogether – and I was now up to 18 subscribers.

Who knew that a few simple circuits thrown together in a couple hours would spread so fast?

I even got yelled at in the comments for not explaining fully what was going on in the first circuit – so I posted a follow-up video!

And I have ideas for even more videos in the works – including some on my Lego projects, and others on my electronics, and even more that aren’t related to any other stuff here.

Evidently by reading my blog, you’re interested in what I’m doing. Not everything that ends up here will also end up on my channel, nor will everything that ends up on my channel also have a blog post about it, but in my opinion, a video is so much better than the typical wall of text you get on this site. Plus you get notifications when I upload a video. Subscribe away!

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