ITP Blog

Energy

Week 3&4 - Kinetic Project

Our kinetic project is a roller paint brush mounted on a stepper motor which generates electricity and turns on a strip of LEDs. First we connected the motor straight to a strip of LEDs in parallel and all the LEDs turned on but as we found out the problem with this method is that the LEDs flicker, it's so fast that is not apparent for the human eye but with slow motion recordings we can clearly see it happening (because the stepper motor is generating AC.)

So we decided to go with using a rectifier to get a smoother result, we also added the capacitors but we had to experiment with different types and found that the 10000µF ones worked the best in our case.

We faced lots of fabrication challenges, because there was not an easy way of mounting a stepper motor (which is chunky and heavy) to a slip roller paint brush handle.

I tried mounting a wooden plate to the back of my stepper motor but then the screws wouldn't go all the way and the stepper motor would not be nice and snug and functioning

So we decided to fabricate a handle around our motor instead. With some wood work and help from the shop we could make a wooden handle and using a NEMA motor mount we mounted the stepper to the wooden handle.

Unfortunately our rectifiers got fried in the process of soldering, so we made our own rectifiers using diodes. Used a protoboard to solder all the necessary parts and have them in a flat circuit: