A small-batch tool for plasma light sculpture — built by a plasma artist, for plasma artists.
If you make plasma light sculpture, you know many of the best conversations about filling come down to one word: experimenting. You talk to the pioneers, you compare notes, you try things. But for those conversations to be meaningful, you need observations you can trust — real numbers from the moment of the fill.
I’m a bit of a tool nerd, and I like a tool that earns its place by doing more than one job. For a while I leaned on things like a Kill-A-Watt to peek at the back end of the transformer — the power it was drawing. But I never fully trusted it for this work. So many of the smaller plasma drivers run off some kind of DC wall adapter, and the readings just didn’t feel accurate enough to learn from. Reach for a bigger driver and you might get through a more complex fill, but for those of us still learning, that often meant we weren’t making efficient fills — we weren’t matching our drivers to the vessels we were building. We were guessing.
The Dyna-Meter is the tool I wanted for that problem: a way to actually see the high-voltage output driving the work, so you can dial in your gas fills and attune your plasma driver instead of chasing a glow by feel.
What is a “Dyna-Meter”?
The Dyna-Meter is a portable, affordable high-voltage AC measurement kit made specifically for plasma light sculpture. It pairs a calibrated HV AC probe with a pocket-sized oscilloscope so you can measure the fast, high-voltage signals that plasma lives in.
Using a capacitive voltage divider, it reads AC from 5 kHz to 500 kHz at ±5% accuracy, with a 1000:1 ratio and up to 20 kV input — the range typical of AC flyback transformers. It’s tuned for that high-frequency world, so it won’t read DC or standard wall-outlet AC. What it will do is show you how each gas mixture loads your transformer, so you can refine your process and come back to what worked.
Every kit includes (in a hard case): the Dyna-Meter probe with HV hook clip and grounding plug, a FNIRSI DSO-152 pocket oscilloscope, an MXC-to-BNC connector, a 6 ft RG9 BNC cable, a USB-to-USB-C cable, and a printed user guide.
First batch, only 8 available before Pre-Order
This first run is limited to 8 units. Each one is built and tuned by hand, so this isn’t a warehouse full of stock — it’s a small batch, made carefully.
For my Patreon supporters
Taming Lightning exists because of the people who support it. My Patreon patrons got first access to this batch — and they keep an ongoing discount on the Dyna-Meter: $20 off with code
at checkout (just use the same email as your Patreon account).
If you’d like early access to future drops, a standing discount, and a front-row seat to what’s being built next, joining the Patreon is the best way in.
Built on the work of Steve Ward
The Dyna-Meter is built on the HV AC probe designs of Steve Ward of Ward Power Electronics. As Steve puts it:
“A high voltage probe can be a valuable tool for the high voltage experimenter or plasma artist to measure the output of, for instance, an ‘AC flyback’ transformer.”
I was introduced to Steve Ward through Aaron Ristau, and I got the chance to test his HV AC probe firsthand.
After living with it for a while, I became convinced that any co-learner in this field would find real use for it — and I wanted to develop it into a product. Over the 4th of July weekend in 2024, I met Steve in person, partly to show him I was serious, and partly to learn the one thing the published design didn’t cover: the tuning process. He walked me through it.
I share Steve’s belief that this should stay open source. The Dyna-Meter isn’t meant to be a secret; it’s a service to the field of plasma light art — made possible by great minds and the plain enthusiasm of people who love plasma illumination.
Behind the scenes: from bare board to finished probe
To make these well — easier, faster, and more consistent — I had to develop and learn a few new skills: PCB design, parts sourcing, designing a 3D-printed body to house the probe, and mixing and pouring potting resin.
Here’s roughly how a probe comes together. Each board gets inspected for defects. I solder the components in order — capacitors first, then the BNC connector, then the high-voltage wire — and test the PCB to confirm it’s reading before I add the ground wire. The 3D-printed enclosure comes in three parts: a BNC cap, the tube body, and an HV cap. I fit the BNC cap to the PCB and seal it with UV resin, glue the body with silicone, and add an outer UV-resin seal. That seal is everything: it has to be watertight, or the potting resin will find every tiny gap.
With the HV cap left off, the tube gets clamped level and I pour in the potting resin — an electronic resin low enough in viscosity that it doesn’t need a vacuum chamber (which is exactly why that seal against the PCB matters so much). I fill until the whole board and part of the HV lead are covered, cap it, and let it cure. Then I strip the lead, solder on the hook-style test clip, and tune — each probe connected to a plasma driver and a test globe of known output.
Only then does it get its look: heat-shrunk in the iconic “Dynamite” red, with the label and batch number sealed between the red and a final layer of clear shrink. Then it’s packed — probe, BNC cable, DSO-152 oscilloscope, stickers, and user guide — into a static-protective bag and the logo’d hard case.
Failures, fixes, and revisions
None of this arrived fully formed. The first big change was moving from perf board to a proper PCB, which made soldering easier and cut down on human error. Then I worked the board as slim as I dared without parts accidentally touching — that’s where the slimmer probe profile came from.
The 3D-printed enclosure came next, printed in PETG-V0, a fire-retardant filament, both as an added layer of safety and, honestly, because a tighter-fitting design made sealing possible. And I swapped the alligator clip for a hook-style test clip — the alligator slipped too easily, which is a real shock hazard around HV.
The most nerve-wracking part, by a mile, was the potting resin. It took me nearly a year to find every place a pour could leak and to make the process repeatable. So many failures came from leaks — some from buying the wrong parts, and one early PCB design that produced nothing but duds. That first board failed because I’d put a grounding copper pour in the design, which made it impossible to tune. Every revision after that was about cleaning up the board and adjusting the thickness of the copper traces.
Tuning itself is the part that’s hard to write down, but a repeatable process once you know what you’re looking for. It still comes down to adding or removing material — a copper-tape shunt connected to ground — not exactly scientific, not strictly procedural. That’s what made it tricky even for Steve to explain. But I got it the way a lot of us learn to make things: by fiddling around until it works.
The quiet, beautiful part? Once I’d bought the correct capacitors, the very first perf board worked on the first try. But the best moment wasn’t a measurement at all — it was sharing progress with Steve and watching him get excited about an idea turning into a real product.
Made possible by the CEA Grant
Development of the Dyna-Meter was supported by Ward Power Electronics and funded in part by a 2025 Creative Entrepreneur Accelerator (CEA) grant — administered by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council on behalf of Pennsylvania Creative Industries, powered by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
That grant is what let me buy parts and tools and, just as importantly, gave me a buffer to make mistakes. Those mistakes are where the learning happened, and I was only in my second year of building out the catalog and services for Taming Lightning — I needed all the help I could get. It also let me hire a graphic designer to create the Dyna-Meter’s logo.
Sold out? Preorders are next
Because this batch is small, it may go quickly. Once these 8 are gone, I’ll open a limited round of preorders, with those units shipping late November to early December. I’m keeping that first preorder round small too — and if the interest is there, I’ll open more.
If plasma is your medium, the Dyna-Meter is my attempt to hand you a clearer window into it. Less mystery, more mastery — built with the plasma community, and made to serve it.
