Motion and smarts

October 17, 2020

Learning about pummers awakened my building instinct, but it turns out the desire goes a bit deeper this time. A blinking light is, well, a blinking light, but it’s somehow very – abstract? immaterial? The non-sitters in the BEAM menagerie get their twitchy motion from tiny motors soldered in weird ways, and that, in turn, is somehow a little – scrappy?

I want motion, but also elegance, and at least some interesting engineering. And hey, my whole obsession with making started with microcontrollers, so there has to be some form of programmed goodness in there too. And so, starting off on the general idea of motors, I rabbitholed into the YouTube sub-genre of scratch-built solar and brushless motors, like this one:

Embedded video: Solar Brushless Motor out of Fidget SPINNER
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Splendid! This guy has done it, so it’s clearly possible: you can make a wheel of magnets spin using the power of an ordinary solar cell. Here’s what piques my imagination:

This is getting warm. But if I’m honest, I don’t need a microcontroller to make this motor run. A single magnetically activated contact is enough, like the reed relay that is used in the video. If you count that as a second moving part, you can substitute electronics, but it’s still a simple analog approach.

I need a good excuse for a microcontroller.

Let’s make it count the wheel’s turns and show it on a display! In fact, let’s make it count those turns forever, showing a number that grows day after day and never resets. In fact, let’s call this thing the forever engine!

I’m so happy with this concept that I made a quick pencil sketch. I put it as the site’s title image, but here it is again:

Sketch of the Solarpunk Forever Engine

There. That’s the outline of the Solarpunk Forever Engine. I’m as excited as you are to see how the build will go!