MagneticPropulsion

We are continuing to make minor improvements to the Compass Magnet Motor by using some 3D printed parts. If you are patient to watch to near the end of the video you will see a 5 second interval slowed to 0.125 x slow motion and can count 28.5 turns. This is nearly as fast as the motor has ever gone. Our hopes are to get up to 700 RPM by improving the alignment of axles and motor as well as the balance. You will see it starts to wobble at higher speeds. Also to be considered are the harmonics of the vibration which make it shake a lot as it reaches top speed. Stay tuned:)

After trouble with bearings they were removed. The compass magnet motor now does near record speeds again but is still a little off balance. It has some 3D printed parts so the motor is perpendicular to the armature and also lined up with the axles. Also an Alwonder size 12 nickel plated ball bearing cloak lock fishing swivel is used to hang the motor armature from. It can go faster but we are quite pleased with 330 RPM. It seems the vibration could have a number of causes but making the upper axle longer helps reduce it. No doubt a more precise future model will have much less vibration. Stay tuned:)

A Ceroppi marble based 7 ball Newton's cradle that was picked up at the bin store and very tangled up got me to wondering. It took about 15 hours of hard work to untangle the knots but for $12 it was a bargain that sells on Amazon for $60. Anyway the mystery is why does only one ball fly out of the end when one collides with the opposite end, or two and two and so on. Why can't one ball collide and two balls fly out the opposite end. It sort of reminded me of a fun trick with an electrified wire fence at a dairy farm. About 5 people formed a chain by holding hands and one person touched the wire. No one felt the shock except the person at the end of the chain who wasn't touching the fence. Stay tuned:)

A simple tweak made a big difference. The password is "resonance". We made the upper axle to the compass motor 1 inch longer and that reduced the shaking that starts around 300 RPM so now the motor can go nearly 350 RPM. Stay tuned:)

Trying some new ideas to get the compass motor to run faster. Stay tuned:)

We invested in a 500RPM N20 motor and a motor bracket to get the compass motor to work better. We also rebuilt the armature from two acrylic discs and brass electronic spacers so with carefully drilled holes the armature is nicely aligned. The N20 motor with the present circuit only gets 5 volts so it doesn't do 500 RPM which it might with 6 volts. Still, we are very happy with these results. Stay tuned:)

The hypothesis is that the north end of a magnet acting as a compass will rotate faster and farther than the south end of that magnet when the magnet is nearer the Earth's magnetic north. The setup is a larger magnet a distance away from a floating magnet. The floating magnet is placed in such a position that the way it will normally point is about 60 degrees from the larger magnet. The floating magnet is then turned away from its normal position and released. The observation is that the north end of the magnet turns farther and faster than the south end of the magnet. The conclusion is that this also applies to a magnet acting as a compass in Earth's magnetic field. The background is that small magnetic boats that swing side to side appear to drive or translate northward and not turn at their center of mass. This is a suggested means of accelerating small satellites in low Earth orbit in certain ways without the use of propellant. Stay tuned:)

A good beginner kit except for the LED tower part. That takes a lot of patience. Stay tuned:)

A good kit to build for a beginner as far as the base goes on the PCB but you will need some patience to do the tower part made out of over 120 LEDs. Stay tuned:)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my subscribers. Stay tuned:)

Technical difficulties caused the loss of the first half of the build but you get the general idea. Fun kit and good SMD practice for hand soldering. Watch the polarities. There was a page of instructions included in this kit that came through Amazon. Stay tuned:)

Earth's magnetic field is very powerful! The compass points north while the motor turns the armature against the magnets. Stay tuned:)

This is the best thru hole soldering practice kit you could hope for. It has around 130 components and a quality but busy PCB. The instructions were fine although we chose to do the LEDS before the capacitors so they could lay flat while soldering them. The schematic explains it all. It has two 4017 decade counter ICS and two 555 timers feeding a signal to them. Three buttons allow you to alter the connection with the second 555, a switch on a capacitor to change the speed and a third switch to give it diagonal controls as well as two potentiometers to control the display. One 4017 is on the positive side of the LEDS and the rows and the other is on the negative side and the columns. So if you try to understand what is going on when it does a horizontal or vertical rastor that makes complete sense but when it goes diagonal you have to try to understand simple multiplexing. For example if you want the LEDs in row 1 column 1 and row 2 column 2 why doesn't row 1 column 2 and row2 column 1 light? Yes that's multiplexing... Lot's of fun with this kit. Stay tuned:)

I like this kit but have some reservations about the PCB design. It's a level 2 out of 5 as far as velleman kit difficulty scale goes. Make sure the electrolytic capacitor is in the correct polarity, something I failed to mention in the video. Stay tuned:)

Compass Boats propelled by Earth's ambient magnetic field with moving parts... Stay tuned:)

This still works even with a hemisphere boat. When the magnet is turned in the still boat it makes the boat turn and also move north. That is the underlying effect that makes magnetic propulsion work. Stay tuned:) #experiment #magnet #physics #acrylic

Uh Oh! In a hemisphere shaped acrylic boat the magnetic/compass propulsion experiment didn't work! Why? Is the whole thing a dead end? Not so fast. There's a perfectly good explanation. Stay tuned:) #experiment #magnet #satellite #thruster #physics

Centripetal Acceleration is equal to tangential velocity squared divided by radius. We calculated that for the 5 inch diameter motor armature at 100 RPM the centripetal acceleration would be about 7 m/s^2 or 0.7 g's. We calibrated the accelerometer and 8x8 LED matrix to light almost all the LEDS at 1 gravity so at about 100 RPM there should be about 6 and a half rows of LEDS lit up. So the idea is at some point in the future to integrate just the accelerometer into the motor control that is on the bottom of the armature and have it regulate the motor so that it could sense when the motor was going out of phase and make corrections or at least stop and restart the motor from a slow speed. Stay tuned:) #arduino #accelerometer #physics #experiment #magnet #motor

A little diversion with a nice project that will keep me entertained hopefully for over a year to see how long the battery lasts. You can paint the inner globe and it will look very nice. Much more fun than buying it and only a small fraction of the price for a Do It Yourself project. Stay tuned:) #diy #experiment #magnet #compass #motor #physics #inventions #science

We recently saw the MOVA globes reviewed on Veritasium so watched it's inventor's videos on how he invented it then searched some more and found the recommended video below on how to make your own for only a few dollars. It uses a clock mechanism that you can buy in any craft store for about $10 that will run on a AA battery (instead of solar cells) for 1 to 2 years and maybe longer. This was our first attempt so it's not absolutely beautiful but has a real nice effect. We had trouble finding the right size balloons. You need 12 inch round balloons. Our balloons were smaller or not round and only covered enough of the inner 3 inch acrylic sphere to keep it water tight but not to look perfect. We think of it as a 1RPM compass motor. Recommended: "Perpetual Motion" rotating globe (Part 2) https://youtu.be/-6UFjmIurcQ rotating globes https://youtu.be/CwBFaO4Lrgo MOVA origins https://youtu.be/EEJtHyv2Rqo Stay tuned:)

When the magnet/compass is away from the center of the balanced boat the boat translates a great deal more as it turns from east to north. Stay tuned:)

The actual physics is much more complicated since you would need to sum the x and y components of the force vectors as they interacted and decreased when the magnet turns to align north but the end result is pretty close to the experiment taking into account the resistance from the water and the difficulty in releasing the boat without pushing it. Something next to consider is what happens when the magnet is far from the center of the boat with a balance weight on the opposite side of the boat. That seems to be much more powerful. Stay tuned:)

Compass torque exponentially stronger than attraction. Stay tuned:)

Great kit! After soldering it together you can put it almost practical use as a toy. Great practice for SMD beginners. Stay tuned:)