12 ms·
A clever “perpetual motion” device [video]
- pxndx 3y agoLost it at the "through the magic of buying two of them" bit!
- debesyla 3y agoThat, by the way, is a reference to another great channel - Technology Connections: https://youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections https://youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
- dageshi 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs-YcmxyUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs-YcmxyUw
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Try1275 3y agoThe video is worth just for his expression at 1:07. Highly recommended. Have no interest in the topic and watched the whole thing!
- iamjackg 3y agoFor those who don't know, it's a reference to Technology Connections[0], another incredible YouTube channel. Alec, the host, is very fond of that bit[1]. [0] https://youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections https://youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs-YcmxyUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs-YcmxyUw
- ChrisClark 3y agoHah yeah, for some reason that line never gets old for me.
- masklinn 3y agoIt’s short, it’s snappy, and it’s only deployed appropriately (by Alec, and by Steve here), so it stays fresh and not overdone. And other similarly nice recurring gag is Tasting History’s hardtack.
- russdill 3y agoOh my gosh, the green screen
- em-bee 3y agoi have only seen a few of alec's videos, but i immediately recognized this as familiar, wondering "hey, that's a different guy"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- comicjk 3y agoWas anyone else hoping it would detect the ball by simply completing a circuit (since the rails are metal and so is the ball)? Then it could give a magnetic tug after an appropriate time. Maybe this would be flaky because of the poor contact between rails and a rolling ball, but an inductive proximity sensor feels like overkill.
- angry_moose 3y agoIt probably wouldn't work nearly as well. It looks like the rails are already a complete circuit - I think they're a single piece of wire that is bent at the end to make a loop, and there are a couple lateral braces soldered on to keep them properly spaced. You'd have to split the rails into two pieces and replace the lateral braces with something nonconductive (plastic) which wouldn't look nearly as nice; and the device would be a lot more prone to going out of calibration if the spacing drifted. Its probably possible but there's a lot of downsides to save $2 on a sensor, some of which will be eaten up elsewhere as it will add some additional parts. Edit: It would also somewhat spoil the magic, as that's the first thing most of us would think of (I certainly did).
- ASalazarMX 3y agoI was thinking a pair of tiny contacts could touch the ball and complete the circuit, but you're right, this isn't an engineering opportunity, but a performance issue. You shouldn't expose electricical components in a perpetual motion simulator.
- djmips 3y agoYes flaky, it's going to corrode and get dirty so the connections won't be reliable
- yantrams 3y agoBrings back childhood memories. Enjoyed reading about these and the accompanying illustrations as a kid from the excellent book Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman. Nirantara Chalana Yantralu they were called in Telugu translation.
- facu17y 3y agoI had the Arabic translated edition of that book! same fond memories!
- tantony 3y ago> Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman I read the same in Malayalam! That book was one of my earliest introductions to practical physics. He deconstructs pretty much all the early "perpetual machine" designs in the book. I also particularly remember the chapter with the experiments with soap bubbles as being very interesting as a kid.
- mdp2021 3y agoThank you for the suggestion! Yakov Perelman - Physics for Entertainment - https://archive.org/details/PhysicsForEntertainment-Eng-YakovPerelman https://archive.org/details/PhysicsForEntertainment-Eng-Yako... I see that Astronomy for Entertainment, Algebra for Entertainment, Figures for Entertainment also exist.
- maerF0x0 3y agoCould this work as a magnetic rail with earth magnets? Would that not require any batteries then?
- ugh123 3y agoHow would you "switch off" the magnets as the train approaches so as to allow it to pass with its newly gotten energy?
- gus_massa 3y agoI'm not sure if the GP is proposing a railgun. In any case, I propose a railgun version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- p1mrx 3y agoWhat do you propose to use as an energy source?
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoExcellent presentation, no dumb graphics, witticism, silly voices or stupid faces pulled etc, just nice clean explanation. Nice toy too. I'd get one but I'd turn it on 3 times then get bored and give it away.
- oldandtired 3y agoSteve makes an interesting statement when he says "we know that perpetual motion is not possible". Yet we have a modification to the general cosmological view with the theoretical entity "dark energy" which if you consider what is said about it properties, it provides a means of creating a "perpetual motion" environment. So what can we say: Does perpetual motion exist or not?
- dist-epoch 3y agoYou are being pedantic. If you want to consider dark energy perpetual motion, sure, but then it's excluded from the "we know that perpetual motion is not possible" rule. "we know that perpetual motion is not possible" is based on the fact that you can't break the laws of physics, which perpetual motion is doing, but if dark energy is part of physics, it can't break those laws by definition.
- oldandtired 3y agoWhen you say > If you want to consider dark energy perpetual motion, sure, but then it's excluded from the "we know that perpetual motion is not possible" rule. That's the incongruity here. You can hedge it around in various ways, but it is still an incongruity, which was my point. I personally do not believe in any perpetual motion mechanism and I find the "dark energy" concept to be in that same set of mechanisms. I somehow think that we will see soon enough a new set of theories and models that have a better explanatory power that what we see being expressed today in cosmology. How long? Don't know. But I suspect it won't be too far away. I think the same thing will happen in regards to the Standard Model. What the fun will be is seeing what comes up. Hopefully people will be able to laugh at themselves when it arrives - though I don't think that this will happen. Too many people take themselves too seriously over these kinds of matters instead of dealing with the matters that really matter.
- dist-epoch 3y agoThere are other forms of "perpetual motion" energy in physics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy
- stavros 3y agoOoh, I'd love to find one of these on Ali, but their search is betraying me currently.
- owenpalmer 3y agoSteve Mould is top-notch
- martinmunk 3y agoThis one is pretty good, but I usually steer clear of his videos. Topics are pretty on point for my interests, be he just seem... Too full of himself? I don't want to be mean in any way, but if someone agrees maybe they can put a finger on what it is
- owenpalmer 3y agoToo full of himself? I'm not sure I understand, can you give an example?
- phailhaus 3y agoThis one is pretty representative of what his videos are like. Could be that you got a skewed first impression? Once you watch a few of them, you can see he's pretty genuine.
- Retr0id 3y agoThere are a few youtubers that come to mind who fit this description, but Steve Mould is not one of them.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoI didn't get the impression he's too full of himself, but he was confident for sure. That's not being full of oneself though, that's making a video interesting, confidence, and not filling the space with caveats or self-deprecation.
- legohead 3y agoI feel like your mind must have confused two people. Steve is very down to Earth. Maybe his youtube-battle with ElectroBOOM turned you off? Where he was pretty convinced he was right about the chain fountain.
- 3y ago
- koromak 3y agoDamn I kinda want to build little doohickeys and sell them on etsy instead of going to work every morning
- tnecniv 3y agoWell then building doohickeys would be your new “going to work”
- semireg 3y agoBusiness is a great way to ruin a hobby.
- Workaccount2 3y agoI can tell you that this has two possible outcomes: 1. You don't sell enough to get by. 2. You sell enough for Chinese knock-offs to come in and offer a good-enough clone product for 1/3 your raw material cost. Being a first world tiny shop in hardware is near impossible.
- masklinn 3y ago(3) you make good looking gizmos which are not really worth copying seems to be the niche of “William”. Apparently the slides were about 150, and they’re externally simple but good looking. They’re out of stock but the shop has neat kinetic sculpture for high hundreds. Could you get plastic versions for a third the price? Absolutely. Would you? Hell nah. I could see kits of spare parts to print and build your own, maybe, but not ready made.
- itigtohft 3y agoIf you search for "perpetual motion machine" you can find a ton of cheap knockoffs of this device. You can get a badly made wooden knockoff for $50 or quite a bit less?
- newaccount74 3y agoThere are a bunch of tiny hardware shops in the audio community that seem to be doing fine, for example https://neurochrome.com/ https://neurochrome.com/ Of course, running a small business like this is not easy, but it's not impossible either.
- johnyzee 3y agoThis got me wondering if it could be made to be entirely mechanical. Like, the approaching ball triggers something to move in front of the magnet 'switching it off', then slides away again when the ball has passed, ready for the next run. I think I just invented perpetual motion...
- tempestn 3y agoNo reason you couldn't do that as long as you just mean the actuation is purely mechanical. You'd still need an electromagnet and power source though, as it only works if you can turn the magnet on and off.
- p1mrx 3y agoWhat do you propose to use as an energy source?
- austinjp 3y agoJust build a second machine to power the first!
- djmips 3y agoclockwork wind-up. It would be bulky but maybe you could put a permanent magnet on a sled or wheel that would impart the necessary force on the metal ball as it approached but then and flipped repelled it. Would be difficult to make work smoothly or at all...
- MetallicDragon 3y agoAny mechanism that could switch the magnet on and off would require energy. E.g. you could put a magnet next to it with opposite poles, which would mostly cancel out the magnetic field, but would require a lot of force to push them together, which is work, and thus requires energy.
- quickthrower2 3y agoThe easiest perpetual motion is just drop a tennis ball. It is just that the perpetually moving thing is no longer the ball :-)
- phelm 3y agoI thought it was going to be a railgun
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoIt can be if the magnet's strong enough!
- tempestn 3y agoHuh, I'd always assumed the ball simply closed a circuit when it rode on the rails, and that's how it knew when to turn the magnet on and off, with suitable delays. It does seem to me you could still do it that way, but it'd probably be more difficult.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 3y agoThis circuit is awfully complex.... it's possible to do the same with a far simpler circuit if you use the same coil for sensing and accelerating the ball. A small microcontroller could do both - perhaps even with low enough power that the whole circuit could stay turned on for years on a charge (when not flinging the ball). Looking at the total energy you need to impart on the ball, you should be able to do that with a far smaller coil and many fewer capacitors as long as you have a suitably shaped steel core to keep the flux path low. I suspect you might be able to do it with no capacitors at all, since modern lithium cells are perfectly happy to deliver 100 amps for a few milliseconds.
- ape4 3y agoAn entire microcontroller to run an approx 3-line program?
- polishdude20 3y agoCheaper than to have a microcontroller that results in a smaller PCB vs discrete components that make the PCB bigger.
- londons_explore 3y agoUsing a single coil, the microcontroller program is pretty complicated. It needs to pulse the coil very briefly on a regular basis and measure the resonant frequency. If you do the capacitor-less design, you might want to have a steel core with sawtooth top, and then use software to measure the position of the ball relative to each tooth and turn the coil on while the ball is heading towards a tooth and off when the ball is heading away. That allows the energy to be extracted from the battery slower. You might also choose to have your coil driven by an h-bridge. That means you can put the energy from the magnetic field that builds up in the steel core back into the battery between each 'tooth'. That should dramatically increase energy efficiency, allowing you to use a smaller (cheaper, lighter, more eco friendly) cell or have the battery last longer. To do that, you'll need current sensing too.
- NavinF 3y ago
- p1mrx 3y agoBe aware that most of the cheap knockoffs just use a motorized wheel. For example, see the videos on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VTJ4LZ8/#ive-videos-for-this-product-widget_feature_div https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VTJ4LZ8/#ive-videos-for-this-pr...
- BugsJustFindMe 3y agoThey also use diagrams showing the ball traveling the wrong way. https://imgur.com/a/o3sHFhX https://imgur.com/a/o3sHFhX
- dylan604 3y agoThe art on most of Amazon's listings is just a thing of beauty, if you're into really bad photoshopping. Some of them are really eyebrow raising, while others are more WAT. I use it as a litmus test as clearly a knock off item, and move away from that listing.
- wingworks 3y agoThe other day I came across the first use of stable diffusion in a listings product in use photos. To me it was obvious, knowing what to look for, but to the average user they'd never know, unless they really paid attention.
- dylan604 3y agoI can almost understand the bad photoshopping from a desire to put the product in situ but you have no budget/time/care to do a real shoot. To what level of generative art did they use for this product shot? Any chance you have a link?
- wingworks 3y agoScroll down to the 2 product in use photos. It's painful to see. https://www.amazon.com.au/Electric-Temperature-40%C2%B0C-120%C2%B0C-Suitable-Gatherings/dp/B0C7V8R911/ https://www.amazon.com.au/Electric-Temperature-40%C2%B0C-120...
- divbzero 3y agoI wonder if the creator of this device William Le [1] has managed to make this his full-time endeavor. [1]: https://www.etsy.com/shop/backtonaturedecor https://www.etsy.com/shop/backtonaturedecor
- rootusrootus 3y agoHe is selling a lot of them today. Another one every minute or so right now.
- djmips 3y agoHmm I wonder if he has enough already made or if it becomes a long backorder situation. 152 sold recently and it they are hand made it could take a while!
- rendall 3y agoHow delightful. I was 99% sure even before I clicked that it would be Steve Mould. Loved his parody of the fixed grin of Technology Connections.
- thefourthchime 3y agoMe too!
- stouset 3y agoThrough the magic of buying two of them…
- MikusR 3y agoEven the outtakes.
- bawolff 3y agoIts cool, but it seems kind of obvious how it would work. Uou can tell the ball is speeding up at the wrong times. It'd be cooler if they could make the motion look more natural.
- at_a_remove 3y agoThat would be definitely interesting. Myself, I could see the following developments: 1) More caps and work in it being powered by ambient light. 2) Taller, perhaps multi-stage. 3) Multiple paths that were somewhat random. Really, I think I am inventing a cat toy. When I was small, I had a racetrack game with just enough randomness to keep my cat completely fascinated.
- bibelo 3y agoI like the idea that the laws of physics allow us to draw conclusions with certainty, despite what our eyes observe: we are sure it's no perpetual device, since science says it's impossible. Exactly with the Sun: our eyes observe that Sun goes around Earth, but science tells us otherwise. Reminds me of the definition of Faith in the Holy Scriptures: "the evident demonstration of realities that are not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Yes, there are realities that exist beyond what we can see, that we can deduce with reasoning. Edit: typo
- moonchild 3y agoThe whole reason science works is that we start by assuming what our eyes tell us is true, and then come up with models to explain that. Edit: plato believed the nature of reality could be discerned with pure reason. He was wrong. Science also works only because it always assumes that its models may be wrong.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago> Exactly with the Sun: our eyes observe that Sun goes around Earth, but science tells us otherwise. These are just two different reference frame. Both are equivalent.
- bibelo 3y agoso you mean the train is not moving?
- OskarS 3y agoTell that to the 16th century Catholic church...
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThat's the irony though, both them and the high school teacher telling you they were wrong is making the same category of error. It's a debate over where to put the origin of the coordinate system, which is an arbitrary choice.
- srijanj 3y agoThe circuit is awfully complex