[Zach Armstrong] presents for your viewing pleasure a simple guide to building a solid-state Tesla coil. The design is based around a self-resonant setup using the UCC2742x gate driver IC, which is used in a transformer-coupled full-wave configuration for delivering maximum power from the line input. The self-resonant bit is implemented by using a small antenna nearby the coil to pick up the EM field, and by suitably clamping and squaring it up, it is fed back into the gate driver to close the feedback loop. Such a setup within reason allows the circuit to oscillate with a wide range of Tesla coil designs, and track any small changes, minimizing the need for fiddly manual tuning that is the usual path you follow building these things.

The Easy, Powerful Solid State Tesla Coil
https://hackaday.io/project/182391-the-easy-powerful-solid-state-tesla-coil

An easy, half-bridge SSTC that can produce beautiful, 12″ sparks with only a few watts of input power

Challenge accepted: Loituma – Ievan Polkka on musical tesla coils!

For those who did not understand what is going on this video, here’s a brief explanation: The main loud music really comes from the tesla coil sparks. They are literally playing the music due to the programmed phase, pulse width and firing frequency! So, there are no speakers, no audio / video special effects. It looks even better in person and sounds almost the same, just louder than people expect!