Built a spot welder to avoid the cost of buying one but it won’t work. It makes a sound when the button is pressed and the wood burns underneath but no weld. The battery is second hand and was very cheap.
Any help would be amazing
It is hard to weld nickel to nickel. What is the material of the electordes? It should be copper. And the contact points should be small. If the contact points are too big, the current has more diameter to pass through the material, and the momentary heat will not be sufficient.
The key thing here is that you have second hand cheap battery, which is propably not good enough. You need about 400A current minimum(that i recall). More is better.
The electrodes are made out of brass. Thanks for the help, I will try with another battery today.
Your electrodes should be copper. I link to some copper roofing nails in one of my videos on YouTube. The guage of your main wire might want to be a little heavier. I’ve found that jumper cable is not adequate. Be sure to make sure both electrodes are seated on your nickel before clicking your button. Make sure you literally just press your button for a split second, otherwise it’s too much time and you could blow a hole in your nickel or battery.
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so I have tried a new battery and it works… ish. It now blows a hole straight through the nickel strip. I have cobbled together a arduino relay with a spare nano I had but am now having troubles making the code work.
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Sure as long you won’t laugh about how simple it is 
I learnt in a couple of ours from YouTube the basic to adapt the preset led script available in Arduino IDE to my purpose. Wait that I look for it
void setup() {
pinMode (LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT); pinMode(2, INPUT);
}
void loop() { // the loop function runs over and over again forever void loop() { digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); if (not digitalRead(2)){ //pulse 1 digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); delay(50); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); //delay delay(450); //pulse 2 digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH); delay(100); digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW); delay(2000); }
}
Bold numbers are the stimuli duration. So if you read from the top you have the first stimulus of 50 msec, then 450 msec delay, second stimulus of 100 msec and 2 sec delay to prevent that the cycle start again. So you will need to press the button again to run it. I used double stimuli because I read of a lot of spot welder that works like that, the first stimulus heats up the nickel strips enough to get a perfect contact with the underneath surface and then the second one welds. So you will need to change those two value based on your system power. I would say start to modify the second, the first one is to get the good contact. Ah and press firmly the tips welding tips against the nickel strips and battery.
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Here is the code I have been using but without much success yet, I can’t see anything wrong with it though.
const uint8_t BUTTON_PIN = 2; const uint8_t RELAY_PIN = 3; const uint8_t LED_PIN = 4;
void setup() { pinMode(BUTTON_PIN, INPUT_PULLUP); pinMode(RELAY_PIN, OUTPUT); pinMode(LED_PIN, OUTPUT); digitalWrite(RELAY_PIN, HIGH); }
void loop() { if (digitalRead(BUTTON_PIN) == LOW) { // button pressed digitalWrite(RELAY_PIN, LOW); // RELAY on digitalWrite(LED_PIN, HIGH); //LED on delay(20); // wait digitalWrite(RELAY_PIN, HIGH); // RELAY off digitalWrite(LED_PIN, LOW); // LED off } }
yeh I am not expert in coding, sorry. Anyhow use a nickel strips and a cutter blade to simulate the battery metal part. On the related forum they suggest it as a good way to simulate the real situation with battery. The secret is to deliver a lot of current in really short time, so you have to be sure that your battery can delivery it.
Thank you for your help, I’ll try your code! I think I’ve fried my solenoid so I can practice my coding until the new one arrives
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