Gyroscopic Lamp by doby

Last crawled date: 2 years, 11 months ago

Designed solely for the S.T.E.A.M technology challenge, Light It Up, this lamp was inspired by wondering if I could create something that would replicate swarming fireflies. Essentially its a lamp with gyroscopic moving parts intended for use inside and out (although its not waterproof so cannot be left outside).
The overall design of the lamp is based on a classic spherical screw cap bulb. I tried to make it look as good when operational as it does when not in use and seeing how night and day are fairly even in duration it was an important factor to consider during the design stage.
How it works:
The lamp has 4 rings and a central orb connected with axles and bearings through which current flows. For every ring, every opposing axel is a positive and negative input, and so eventually electricity gets to the orb in the middle by linking the rings up (or so I thought, more on that later...)
Each ring has 12 yellow flicker LEDs and the orb in the center has 48 yellow flicker LEDs. The outer ring is connected to a motor hidden in the screw cap of the bulb shape to spin the rings. There's also a motor inside the orb connected to a weight which displaces the weight in the orb to counter balance the rings alignment when spinning horizontally. The result being that the rings should be in a constant state of movement around their axes in different directions. Also hidden in the screw cap is all the circuitry for the lamp.
The lamp is triggered by an IR sensor located in the nipple of the bulb shape. There are 2 voltage ramp circuits to power the main motor and LEDs/orb motor. When triggered the outer ring will slowly build up speed and the LED's will fade on then, once the IR circuit cuts the power after an allotted time, the outer ring will slowly decrease its speed and the LED's will fade off.
The screw cap and the dome contact point of the bulb shape have both been designed with twist and lock mechanisms to enable easy access to the circuitry once the model has been fully built. This gives easy access if you need to troubleshoot something or alter the ramp times of the ramp circuits and trigger duration for the IR circuit.
Confessions:
Admittedly the design needs more work, currently the electrical current is having difficulty reaching the centre due to the poor connections provided by the bearings and as a result there is a steep voltage drop off. However I'm out of time for the challenge so I'm submitting it as it is. I think I've made pretty good progress for a fairly ambitious and unpredictable project and as it stands at the moment its still pretty cool.
Future revisions:
I intend to address these issue in the coming weeks, using a slip ring to guarantee a stable connection into the largest ring and then refining the bearing and axel connections. I could also replace the resistors in the rings using larger values for the outermost larger rings and reducing the values as they go inwards reflecting the voltage drop from the bearing connections. This would allow me to run the LEDs safely at a higher voltage whilst still reaching the target voltage of 4.5V for the orb.
Powered by 12V (3A roughly), with an inbuilt DC regulator powering the LED's/orb motor at 4.5V.
Designed in Rhino. All meshes are manifold (watertight).
Videos:
Operational: http://youtu.be/thDSA45_KGY
What it should look like fully illuminated (minus the rotation): http://youtu.be/S3ub-kNEwfA