LumiLife is a project I collobarated on with Zevensuy Rodriguez. The goal of the project was to create a stand-alone kinetic art piece with functionality. Lumilife inconspiciously charges in sun or light and illuminates and bellows when the lantern is in the dark. The project uses a nocturnal circuit and a motor control circuit.
This is the diagram of how it all flows together.
The nocturnal circuit is made of a 74AC14
This is the schematic for the nocturnal circuit from the beam wiki site.
The motor controller circuit is composed of a 74AC14 and a 74AC240. The motor circuit was made from this tutorial on the beam wiki site. The parts include
74AC14 Hex Schmitt Inverter IC (the MicroCore chip).
74AC240 Octal Buffer / Line Driver with Tri-state Outputs (The Motor Driver).
.22 uF Monolithic Capacitors (Four).
10 uF Monolithic, Electrolytic or Tantalum Capacitors (Two).
2 Meg Resistors red-black-green (Four).
4.2 uF Monolithic or Tantalum Capacitors (One for the Reversing Circuit).
3 Meg Resistors orange-black-green (One for the Reversing Circuit).
1N914 or 1N4148 Diodes (Two).
This picture from the beam wiki site illustrates all of the basic connections for the 74AC14 microcore to work.
This is how to wire the 74AC240
The one thing missing from the graphic above is a cap going from pin 20 to pin 1.
This image shows how to connect the motors and connect the 74AC14 and 74AC240.
Zeven and I are creating a solar powered tone generator for our final with a form factor of a spider. A miller engine circuit will power the “legs” which will act as switches to set off the tones.
We are using the simple LM 386 amplifier circuit and a hacked into Hex Schmitt Trigger. Both circuits are powered by four solar panels wired in Series and Parallel. The buzzing oscillator sound is a square wave and runs on 6 volts.
The Miller Engine Circuit is powered by 4 solar panels wired in parallel creating 80 -100 miliamps and 3 volts. A small geared page motor acts as a “leg” switch to turn on the audio circuit.
Right now we are having an issue with the miller engine. Our amperage for our circuit is being lost somewhere in our circuit. We are only getting 25mA out of a possible 130mA. After testing the capacitors, trigger, and transistor we have found out that those are not the problems. We now assume it could be the signal pin on the voltage trigger not letting all of the amperage through.
For my kinetic project I built a kinetically powered Ninja. Creating a homemade magnetic electric field, I was able to power a small hacked radio shack voice recorder/play back device.
The form factor was a knit hand-held object:
I used thin magnetic wire wrapped tightly packed around a plexiglass tube with a rare earth magnet inside of it. When you move the magnet back and forth, a current is induced in the coil.
Using a rectifier circuit with and a diode bridge, I was able convert the AC input to DC. I then stored the electrical energy in a 1 farad capacitor.
The load was a small 9volt Radio Voice Recorder with built in speaker that I recorded the theme of Mortal Kombat onto. I could playback the recording with a minimum of 2.3 volts. I hacked the switch of the recorder, and replaced it with my own switch.
Some numbers:
Energy Converter: Magnetic Induction / shaker
capacitor 5 volts at 1 farad
15 mA at .4 volts
Test Capacitor Capacitance (farads)
1 farad
Target Capacitor Voltage (Volts)
at least 2 volts, but up to 9 volts
Target Capacitor Change in Energy (joules)
.5 * 1 farad * ((2 volts)^2) = 2 joules
Time to Charge to 2 volts
4 minutes
2 minutes of constant shaking per volt Observed Power (Watts)
(2 joules) / (4 minutes) = 0.00833333333 watts
