Heh... Recalling a demonstration by an EE prof way back when. He had the bank of capacitors charging up on his desk, and was writing on the blackboard the equations of how much energy was stored. Hand raised in the back of the room. "Uh, Dr. Miagawa, I think you slipped a decimal point there." Prof looks over his work again, says "Oh, dear" unplugs the charger and backs away. He tapes two meter sticks together with a screwdriver on the end to discharge his little electrobomb. WHAMO, screwdriver vaporizes.
I'm pretty much convinced this was not a mistake, it was a "Be really CAREFUL with this stuff!" object lesson.
My first lesson in "capacitors store electricity" when I was a kid was when I took the battery out of a disposable camera... and then managed to shock myself with the flash discharge anyways.
When I was a teenager I opened a disposable camera to explore its contents; the flash was charged when I touched the circuit and I got the SHOCK of my life. I learned about capacitors the stupid way.
It doesn't take mains voltage to get electrolytic capacitors to fail catastrophically. Just reverse the current. (Or rather don't).
Nearly lost an eye when a kid I was paired up with in science class made that mistake. The cap blew off with a loud bang, and I was left with a perfectly symmetrical round bruise just above my eyebrow.
I never forgave him. Not for nearly blinding me, but because he was happy to let everyone believe it was me who had made the mistake!
I never really understood capacitors until I started trying to construct proper water-analogies for them. Then I discovered that my electronics and physics classes had sent me down a dead-end path with their garbage about "capacitors store electric charge." Since my discovery, I've gained significantly more expertise in circuit design, which leads me to a sad thought. Maybe the more skilled of electrical engineers and scientists gain their extreme expertise not through classroom learning. Instead they gain expertise in spite of our K-12 classroom learning. Maybe the experts are experts only because they have fought free of the wrong parts of grade school science, while the rest of us are still living under the yoke of the many physics misconceptions we were carefully taught in early grades.
While I agree with what you said I would warn everyone who decides to pursue this endeavour and has no experience that capacitors can store a good lethal dose of voltage for quite some time.
Also I enjoy this YouTuber's explanation about capacitors quite a lot. Uncle Doug is a terrific presenter:
https://youtu.be/l-u8J-yh9ZA
Attempting to take apart a TV set back in my childhood got me a lesson in that just because it's not plugged in, doesn't mean there is no electricity in it, those capacitors pack a punch one never forgets.
Back in the tube TV times, I knew some guy working at a TV shop who shot off half a thumb, because he touched a loaded capacitor in a TV that was just unplugged.
Don't underestimate the power of every day appliences.
Early on in my 'take things apart for fun' youth, I knew that capacitors held a charge long after power was removed. So when disassembling a camera with built in flash, I popped off the small board holding the 330V capacitor and thought it would be a great idea to discharge it using the end of my needle nose pliers—for the tiny capacitors I'd done this to before, it might've caused a tiny spark, but nothing more.
Well, I learned a valuable lesson that day; even relatively harmless camera flash capacitors can pack quite a charge days after a battery's been removed!
The giant spark made me jump back and fall over my chair, and my pliers still have two nice molten burn marks where it touched the contacts. I'm just glad the pliers had rubber handles!
I'm much more cautious around capacitors these days.
"The code caused the capacitors to keep charging even after they had reached their limit, until kaboom."
Sorry, but that isn't possible. Maybe if you keep raising the voltage (which would be a pretty strange thing to do), but even then it wouldn't cause an explosion, but rather a short. And no capacitor I have ever heard of can store enough energy to explode.
I'm pretty much convinced this was not a mistake, it was a "Be really CAREFUL with this stuff!" object lesson.
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