151–160 of 180 posts
A couple ideas for improvement. If you have extra identical motors and disassemble two, you can fashion a rotating power transmission system from the brushes in two assemblies. You sacrifice two motors for each unit, but it's a perfect fit and very reliable (with a cap and rectifier), and you don't have to worry about batteries anymore. The rectifier also provides a signal that the assembly has completed a rotation,…
I am always banging on about software is a new form of literacy and I love and encourage any attempt to get kids coding, but there is a huge gap of "maker" style hands on availability - more libraries with "maker" areas, more encouragement
The UK supposedly has a large software gaming industry now because of things like BBC micro and the cottage industries that sprang up in the early eighties
I conjecture that a similar industry of light-medium hardware will spring out of building sufficient open access and just letting creative people find entirely new ways to build.
In short, me wanna try that, and I am egotistical enough to believe everyone else will too
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I wonder if anyone has built multi-speed “layered” swept volumetric displays. For the center part, you would still just have one screen, but as you go further out, you’d have “spokes”, so that each screen only has to sweep a small angle (and roughly constant distance) during a frame, so that it rotates at lower RPM, and has to update fewer times. You would still need a bare minimum of 1-2 kHz, and a lot of screens, a…
Not exactly sure what the details, but there high quality, commercial products that are probably doing something like this: https://voxon.co/products/
"Small circuit boards from China are essentially free[..]" A little later: "Some time ago, I got access to a pick and place machine (a Charmhigh CHM-T36VA). I have it on semi-permanent loan." Why is it, that it still makes sense to assemble boards yourself while outsourcing PCBs is a no-brainer? It doesn't have to be "essentially free" , but isn't there an assembly service that is suitable for hobby projects like thi…
What's missing here is that I grok the concepts but I am ammillion miles away from having the tools, the setup, the basal how-to to appreciate how hard this was I am always banging on about software is a new form of literacy and I love and encourage any attempt to get kids coding, but there is a huge gap of "maker" style hands on availability - more libraries with "maker" areas, more encouragement The UK supposedly h…
Several points:
Reading code solely does not make you good expert in it.
Literacy is needed in any area, while artisans can go without software and still produce.
Software is about logic, literacy is about conveying meaning.
Knowing how to code does not at all teach you how to communicate.
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Another idea: why not put a tiny TFT display on the motor? You can get cheap ones at aliexpress.
Standard displays are 60 Hz. You need a much higher framerate because not only do you want 60 frames a second, but you also want some number of frames per angular rotation. For 1° of angular resolution, you would need: 360°*60 Hz = 21,600 Hz display. Liquid crystals can be modulated at KHz speeds, but you're not going to find associated driving circuitry to do that. It's not easy, and there's no demand for it. A TI D…
If you make the number of columns odd, won't it naturally lead to centered LEDs?
Imagine the LED circuit board placed flat on a table. He's talking about adjusting the position of the LEDs in the vertical direction, which means adjusting the position of their board. Moving the LEDs relative to their board won't help.
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What about keeping the motors intact and using the second as a generator?
I might be misunderstanding the idea, but I don't think it addresses the original problem that wires can't connect the two parts of something that rotates in a single direction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Standard displays are 60 Hz. You need a much higher framerate because not only do you want 60 frames a second, but you also want some number of frames per angular rotation. For 1° of angular resolution, you would need: 360°*60 Hz = 21,600 Hz display. Liquid crystals can be modulated at KHz speeds, but you're not going to find associated driving circuitry to do that. It's not easy, and there's no demand for it. A TI D…
I saw a cool design where they stacked transparent displays