The wooden balls magbot pendulum
June 2010,In the last few weeks I seem to have reached magbot pendulum phase
of my projects.
The most recent one started out as an all wooden one: a few weeks back I bought
some wooden balls to be used as pendulums.Then I thought it would be interesting
to use the wooden balls as a reoccurring part in a magbot pendulum.Version 1
was: a large size ball on a stand,a wooden dowel inside it and at the end a medium
size ball,then two wooden arms with small size balls at the end and then smaller
size balls as pendulum bobs.
But I found out I hadn't enough material to build this(the aim always being t
o use recycled parts as much as possible)and one arm just didn't look right.
So,enter Version 2:up to the medium size ball it's the same as V1,the two wooden
arms are replaced by the arms of a record player stylus.With the advantage that
they have a nice bend.
Of course after V2 Version 3 wasn't far away,in this one the wooden central rod is
replaced by an aluminium piece of tubing.
I didn't knew if I should point the arms downwards or upwards,so decided,can you
guess?,to have one upwards and the other one downwards.
I drilled a hole in underside of the wooden pendulum bobs and placed 3 1/2 " (circa
12 mm)magnets each inside.They are being held in place because of the metal eyelets
on top of the wooden balls.
Originally I wanted to use one 3.5 Volt solar cell to power two electronic circuits
but that didn't work and
I didn't had a larger one available so two solar cells it was.
