It's fascinating that you can get to the level of atomic material properties as a spinning top hacker. Diamond seems like it'd be the obvious winner, if you could somehow get a perfectly polished and smooth surface.
I'd love to see a small Prince Rupert's drop for a tip and a ruby/sapphire spinning surface - you'd need to make a ton of drops, probably, but having a round, nearly spherical contact geometry and super smooth surface seems like a winning combo.
An interesting fact is that spinning tops are extremely ancient toys.
For instance, a spinning top is already mentioned in the Iliad of Homer, where he compares the rotation of a certain warrior after receiving a very strong off-center strike with the rotation of a spinning top ("strombo-" in Ancient Greek).
I saw this and, while interesting and impressive, this isn't really a spinning top. It's a gyroscope. I was hoping for a real like "I cast metal into the perfect shape that I physically derived somehow to last as long as possible" or something similar not just "I put a motor in a case and it spins"
Freaked me out for a second and had to double check that my tablet comes with a stop watch without having to download an app WITH ADS!!!!! Does he earn money for displaying these ads in his video too? I find it hard to believe that a content creator with sponsors is forced to use an ad supported app. Something about it being a stopwatch really just adds the cherry on top
I saw what I thought was no ad, but you could still see the little widget in the upper right hand corner that still revealed where the ad would appear like when you manually click close ad on a website.
Saw this last week, really enjoyed the tenacity in problem-solving!!
Did make me wonder if you could build a solid state one using well-timed pulses through an electromagnet that provide torque through the field interaction with the earth's magnetic field.
Not much torque available there obviously, but on a per-revolution basis you don't need much.
At around the end of the fidget spinner craze I thought "but what would it take to make it spin by its own?" And it turned out, not much. Just put one magnet at each of the three ends, and have some pulsating magnet near it (next to it, or under it hidden in some kind of base), and there! you have a basic electric motor that seems entirely magical.
It was a really fun experiment; I even toyed with doing a small production run but by the time I was almost ready the craze had passed.
he is also using development boards wired together rather than a custom pcb. there's a good chance the choice of passive components, removal of unneeded components, and better optimized power converters can improve the design.
I love projects like this. Taking something trivially simple and asking "but what if we really optimized it?"
The material science discussion in these comments is fascinating. Never thought about how the contact point geometry matters so much. Diamond tip makes intuitive sense for hardness, but then you need something it can spin on without scratching...
My mind immediately went towards Battlebots when I saw electronics getting involved. I wonder what else would need to be done to make this steerable over RC? There may be a lower weight class where some nicely CNC'ed 'Phantasm Orbs' can score reasonable points.
This already exists- there's a class of robot called "meltybrains" which spin the whole robot using one or more wheel, detect the speed of spinning with a gyro and modulate the speed of the wheels at different points in its' rotation in order to create translational movement. Since they effectively put all the weight allowance into the "weapon" they can be very effective. The additional complexity means that they are hard to get working reliably in chaotic combat conditions. A team called "Project liftoff" had some serious success though.
I saw Project Liftoff in person, that little death-frisbee? Looked like they have two points of contact with the floor, which is probably just better design.
And now that I think a bit further, I might just be imagining a more complicated version of one of those crabwalk spinny metal ones..
Meltybrains are still wheeled robots even if they use the wheels in a novel way.
If you could develop a self-starting top capable of remote controlled translational movement you would get non-wheeled weight bonuses up to 2x in most competitions.
this guy is super great but wow do the juvenile sexist comments he makes (over and over again, tripling down on them) detract from the overall value of the video. Would female engineering students really appreciate all that? I think not
I'd love to see a small Prince Rupert's drop for a tip and a ruby/sapphire spinning surface - you'd need to make a ton of drops, probably, but having a round, nearly spherical contact geometry and super smooth surface seems like a winning combo.
For instance, a spinning top is already mentioned in the Iliad of Homer, where he compares the rotation of a certain warrior after receiving a very strong off-center strike with the rotation of a spinning top ("strombo-" in Ancient Greek).
Awesome!
Did make me wonder if you could build a solid state one using well-timed pulses through an electromagnet that provide torque through the field interaction with the earth's magnetic field.
Not much torque available there obviously, but on a per-revolution basis you don't need much.
At around the end of the fidget spinner craze I thought "but what would it take to make it spin by its own?" And it turned out, not much. Just put one magnet at each of the three ends, and have some pulsating magnet near it (next to it, or under it hidden in some kind of base), and there! you have a basic electric motor that seems entirely magical.
It was a really fun experiment; I even toyed with doing a small production run but by the time I was almost ready the craze had passed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-NII1RdlcQ
How long would a better battery go here?
I'm curious what the jump from 2-> 40+ hours requires
Guess it's cnc milled, maybe that's part of it. Increase mass of the thing? Idk
The material science discussion in these comments is fascinating. Never thought about how the contact point geometry matters so much. Diamond tip makes intuitive sense for hardness, but then you need something it can spin on without scratching...
https://youtu.be/0Yubn6P5DUw
And now that I think a bit further, I might just be imagining a more complicated version of one of those crabwalk spinny metal ones..
If you could develop a self-starting top capable of remote controlled translational movement you would get non-wheeled weight bonuses up to 2x in most competitions.