LED Orb 2.0

Hmmm. Hi.

As with merlin I just signed up to say basically the same thing. I think this is completely awesome and me and a friend have been working on making our own. I hope it doesn't offend you that we're copying your work.

you should be proud actually, you've inspired us to do more than sit around playing Bioshock 2, and I spent the time to finally figure out how that darn 555 timer really works, as well as learning various other new tidbits.

We initially planned to use hard drive motors, and for anyone else attempting this, I do NOT recommend this. They're really cool and interesting, but somewhat complicated to get them to run. Not only that, but they have almost no torque and thus aren't really suitable for this project. Just fyi.

Also a thanks to merlin, those tips to view the pictures were really helpful. We've been working on it for four days without pictures, I think we've come up with some creative solutions to problems, but the pictures are very interesting nonetheless.

We too have cool ideas for modifications haha, but for now we're still trying to get one axis to be 100% (or as near to it as it can be) functional and reliable. We'll keep referring to these forums and if you don't mind maybe even ask some questions when we get stumped.

Thanks again for the cool idea and fun project. Very awesome for a week project I must say. Working on any other fun toys or back to real life for now? Haha

i really like the idea of spinning the led's very fast , but the only thing i cant figure out is how that you extended the rotor of the motor

Pontiacg5 said:

French and Spanish are pretty much the same thing

Don't let my old Spanish teacher hear that tough! (I thought that was Spanish!)

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No!! Spanish is NOT the same as french... :scowl:
They are different. A lot.
Btw, I'm Spanish and I tried to learn some French... haha

Hi FireMyLaser,

I'm starting my build soon, (with some interesting adaptations that I will share once they progress) and was hoping you might be able to tell me about the torques and speeds of the various motors you used (though I don't really need to know about the smallest one).

This would be very helpful when buying the motors, so I can make sure that they will be strong enough to turn everything.

As a sneak preview, the main adaptation I will be making is that I'm not planning on using any slip rings, but instead will be using magnetic induction to transfer power across the moving parts... :shhh:

Pretty crazy, wish me luck!

Hi mmmerlin, I don't know anything about the motors since I just had them laying around. The top motors had to be current limited because 12V was too much, the bottom motor is 12V

OK, never mind, guesswork it is then! Thanks for getting back to me anyway

Hey Fire, this is the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Someone posted it over on PL, and I saw the video, when both axes started spinning I thought it was kind of neat, but you got a 'NO WAY!!' when the 3rd axis powered up. Nice work on those slip rings and solving the balance and structural and weight requirements for the interior. Do be careful, I expect the inner LED legs might fatigue over time at the epoxy hub joint and you might end up with an LED bullet. Are there easily available carbon fiber strips over there?
Carbon fiber strip $11
This might aid in creating a lightweight center structure and LED support without fatigue.

I'm quite intrigued how you got the slip rings to work so reliably, every slip ring device I have ever made has failed pretty quickly

à ìóæèêè-òî íå çíàþò

I saw the vid for this on youtube, and I have to have one. I can't believe nobody has posted a how to for this yet.

I'm going to have to try my hand at this. But to be honest I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm really hoping somebody here could help me. So far on a theoretical level, I think i understand the slip contacts after about 4 hours of way too close inspection of your pictures. Is there any reason you didn't use potentiometers to control fan speed? Seems like a fun idea to me.

Also the thing in the center that the leds are connected to almost looks like a small circuit board, but I'm thinking its probably just a couple resistors in a big blob of epoxy. Am I right?

Amazing job by the way, not only with the concept, but the details as well. Using pencil lead and antenna tube for a slip contact, it's absolutely brilliant in it's simplicity, and I never would have thought of it. I agree with the others who say that you should patent this.

that's a very good job, when i saw it on a blog, i thought it was more difficult, something like operational amplifiers or that things like modulers, but now i see it was a 555, very simply, it's a good job, realy good, thanks, maybe i will do my own spinning orb, hehe, i hope there are no problem whit that, cause it's your idea, hehe

RomanIgla455 said:

à ìóæèêè-òî íå çíàþò

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Sure!

omg... il like it very much!!!! good job man!

Ok i'm new to electronics and I'm trying to follow along how he made his slip rings. If someone wouldn't mind sketching something out to help me understand how to build one as well as listing materials to use. I posted this picture if someone would be so kind as to label the slip ring connections in it. I'm also curious on how he made the spring connection carrying the power to the LEDs.

There are some different ways for build slip rings, depend how much you have to use the item, and the speed and degree of precision ..... the easiest one is to place one (or more, depend how much slip contacts you need) pieces of brass or copper tube on the rolling axis (ofcourse, insulating them with plastic tube or layers, from the central axis), and then use parts of old motors as brushes (i mean, if you cannot find elastic contacts, the easiest way for find them is to dismantle some old DC motors) ..... contact pads can be built with protoboards or etched PCB parts ..... and so on .....

Can be helpful to know for what use you need them .....

Iceman344 said:

i really like the idea of spinning the led's very fast , but the only thing i cant figure out is how that you extended the rotor of the motor

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I've had the same problem when i tried to do it as well. I started just trying to get a single axis spinning with led's but i couldn't extend the motor axle to attach it all to, when i used hot glue or whatnot to attach an extension it wasn't perfectly centre and just flew off after a few seconds.
how did you do that or did you just have a motor with a long axle on it?

also, awesome work building it by the way, two thumbs up (Y) (Y)

and a good idea if you havent already used it is use a voltage controlled pulse width oscillator using LM555 and LM393 IC's. this way you can get full control over the frequency of the led's by modifying one of the resistors using a potentiometer, it would be an improvement over having only a few options for the led's frequency.