USB Plasma Ball

Woohoo! Received a freebie from Rapidshare.com!!!

Got it by converting 30,000 RapidPoints earned from remote-uploading TV shows, movies & of course, Top Gear. ;)
Took around 1 month for the package to ship, directly from Switzerland. Yes, RS.com is in Scheiwz, not Deutschland.

Standard box, made in China. Nothing interesting, until a thing caught my eye.

PC & Mac compatible? No, there’s something much worst...

ROFLMAO!!!  xD

Getting back to the plasma, here's the orb switched off...

& tadaa!!!

This is awesome.

Just like lightning.

Touching the orb with one finger concentrates the arcs.

Multitouch splits them evenly.

The Physics Behind

Would you believe it that Nikola Tesla invented this thing… Wow! (He also invented teleportation in The Prestige)
The principle is pretty simple. The Argon-Neon gas mixture at low pressure is ionized with a very large electric field of several kV, which causes electric discharges in form of emission of photons. & when you hover your finger over it, the electric field is distorted by the capacitance of your body – this is very smiliar to the iPhone’s capacitive technology. Read the following sites for more:
- Wikipedia – Plasma Lamp
- PLASMA BALLS!
- PLASMA LAMPS - A simplified explanation with pictures of how these light-effect lamps work
- Plasma "Globe" Construction

But there are drawbacks. Plasma balls have health hazards – continued operation produces ozone gas, which is harmful to health – remember the peculiar smell near photocopy machines? Yeah, that’s ozone.
& there’s build-up of static charge… which is lethal for electronics. Yeah, it’s a paradox that a static-inducing device is meant to be USB-powered.

I'll be honest... Nothing beats the sheer awesomeness of the plasma arc – an incredible piece of technology, but in fact… totally useless. I'm already regretting ordering this. The reason why I started earning points was to get the top reward - a 10MP camera at 150k points... However RS.com removed the camera, & I decided to drop it, thus converting the points I had earned so far into this plasma ball.
Guess what now? RS.com just added back a 10MP camera at 150k... :(