Some of you might remember my LED Ball I made a few years ago... It had three LEDs and two axes. Now I've made another one with three axes!



YouTube - Spinning RGB LED Ball II


It was very hard to build! I has a lot of problems with the power transfer and failed may times before I got everything working smoothly. Now it runs like a dream.
I made it all from very simple materials like wood, VCR-parts, fans, junk, antenna tubes and a lot of solder!

Total of 9 slip-contacts, not including the motors!
The current for the LEDs has travel through 6 slip-contact without glitching!
It took about a week to build.


(many) Pictures:


The device:



The controller. The unit to the left is a modified bike light, apparently if one of the resistors changed it's value, the frequency would also change. I replaced it with a 500K ohm pot and amplified the output with a transistor. The circuit has four modes: on - fast blink - slow blink - off.

The unit to the right is the motor controller. It's made of three 555-timer circuits that change the speed of the motors with pulse width modulation. It's the same controller I use for my spirographs and such.



A close-up of the head/nougat-core/whatever. Just three LEDs, one red, green and blue. The small DC-motor is a from a RC-heli that I got from my dad's colleague, thanks! The frame is made of a ton of leads from LEDs, they work best for this kind of thing because they are very stiff. Can I haz mad soldering skillz?!



The arrow points at a tiny spring who carries the positive voltage to the LEDs.



On the opposite side is the contact for the negative voltage. The big blob of solder is the counter weight.



The LEDs and their current limiting resistors are attached on a small perfboard, all in-closed in epoxy.







The second motor.



On the opposite side is the slip-ring assembly for the first motor and LEDs.



Pencil lead give the best results as a wiper contact!



Slip-rings made from antenna tubes.



The common connection.


Here are the four power wires from the base.


Here are the wiper contacts for the bottom axis. Made from LED-leads and perfboard.





The bottom slip-ring assembly and gear reduction.


Assembled.


Home-made motor mount.


This big resistor limits the current to the first motor.


Modular connections.



A few pictures in the dark. My camera does a very poor job at this

Oh boy! I've been waiting for this since last night!

Very very nice work, some of those pictures would make really nice wallpapers .

Insanely cool.

Congratulation for the work and the assembly ..... i'm glad to see that i'm not the only one around crazy enough to play with these things

That is the nuts!

I think I like it more than your 3-D Spiro.

Don't shine a green laser at it when it's running whatever you do! It might end up like your Avatar!

Great skills.

M

Thats a amazing piece of work, very intricate. Especially that center beam you built. Is that center beam made entirely of LED legs and solder?

Nice Job, you must be very proud

Fecking awesome.

"Can I haz mad soldering skillz?!"

Wow, that's really awesome solder lead framework. And it doesn't bend under the spinning force is amazing.

Holy Light Ball Batman. id give maybe half of my left nut for those soldering skills.

Wow.. I am speechless.

That is amazing.... I can see all the hard and intricate work
that went into each detailed aspect of that build...

Jerry

No you don't, lol!

Thanks Jerry and everyone

Great Job!!!!

I really like it alot.

Have you thought about PWM the LED's as well? Would it make variable (different) patterns when coupled with varying the speeds?

Yeah I have been thinking about that. I've done some research in the past about 555-timers, but I haven't found a design that allows varying the frequency while keeping the duty-cycle constant and vice versa . Maybe I should get onto the arduino bandwagon...

You should. It would make for a pretty cool addition, although it's great as-is.

One of the coolest things I've seen done with LED's Thanks FML

The very best was at BM in the black rock desert a man made a cube 10' square and filled it with thousands of ping pong balls hanging on strings like loose pearls, inside of each ball was a RGB LED, all were controled with a computer and it was like a 3D display totaly knock your socks off !
people would go watch it and trip for hours, It could be on the BM web site I havent looked.

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Heck yes that's cool! (I watched the whole 7:24 video, I was mesmerized)

Did you have any vibration problems FML?
Balancing that thing must of been a real PITA.

Ray

Yeah, the balancing was tough.

Could you not hook it up to one of your full colour WF drivers to see how it goes? Turn the current down etc...

Should be some cool effects from that?

M

It's a good idea but it won't work because I can't control the LEDs individually.


On another note, this has been circulating on a few DIY blogs and I keep seeing comments referring to the movie "Contact", so I made a rage pic about it:

BAHAHAHAHA!! Good one.

I was just thinking about that movie a few hours ago.

Queue Twilight Zone music....

LOL, that setup was the one that gave me the same idea, when i made mine ..... only, i never added a third axis, cause my one had the leds outside

FML if you got into engineering, you could make some serious $$. Your work is crude, but your ideas are great. If you put some polish on that, you could probably patent the idea, and present it as a solid prototype.

OMG dude i love your work keep it up that is awesome inspires me to get crackin on some of my projects