HV Transformer dude almost terminating himself and the house cat!

[schmitt trigger]

Thanks Tooki, for filling the (quite large) gaps in my story.

[Black Phoenix]

Many moons ago as a work experience kid in a film developing shop (remember those!) I took home a few boxes laden with discarded disposable camera shells.

I extracted about a couple dozen capacitors and connected them in parallel to a single flash unit from one disposable shell.  After several minutes of charging I triggered the flash.  Made the loudest BOOM I've heard in my entire life, and temporarily lost some hearing in one ear.  Vaporised the Xenon flash tube bulb of course, only the legs of the bulb remained with their PCB connecting wires.

Never knew so much energy could be released from a single AA battery!

I had 2 spots in my hand from a Nikon charged camera capacitor I discharged by inadvertently touching both contacts in the PCB while handling it. Looks like believing the owner of the camera that he didn't use it for a while (so assuming that it was discharged) was the wrong thing to do.

Lesson learned, now I take caps as if they were a "loaded gun" and always proceed to discharge them before attempting any kind of handling of a naked PCB.

Heck still to this day when I think about it it still tingles where it "bitten".