I don't own an oscilloscope, and nothing at home is sensitive enough either. The voltages here are so small that a regular multimeter just doesn't see them. So every single measurement meant packing up and going back to school to use theirs.

And every time I went, it showed something a little different. Not wildly different, but enough that I genuinely couldn't tell if I was making real progress or just chasing noise. For a while I was basically improving the design blind. Tweaking the gap, the winding, the blades, with no reliable way to check if any of it actually helped until the next school visit.

The strangest moment was on the channel measuring after the diode bridge. The scope showed a current that honestly shouldn't have been possible, way more than that tiny voltage could ever push through closed diodes. I'm still not fully sure what happened there. It appears to be related to how that channel was set up rather than anything flowing through the bridge. Either way, it taught me that a weird reading is still data. You have to figure out what it's actually telling you, and sometimes that feels like trying to understand someone speaking a language you've never heard before. :((((