Am I the only one who read the video title as “Inside the awesome *Argon* laser sphere”, and got very excited at the thought of Clive getting ahold of a high power Argon laser?
Many thanks. I had a cruder ancestor of this for many years - a filament light bulb inside a rotating globe that had different coloured transparent discs. I bought it in Maplin's. It used an ac motor, too. It needed increasing amounts of TLC after several years, mostly involving resetting the position of the motor and its gear. Eventually the lights stayed on one time too often with the globe stuck, so I tore it down (again). The plastic parts inside had disintegrated so I decided to give it an honorary burial. I also had a fibre optic mini Christmas tree which turned a celluloid disc embossed with different designs and colours inside its flowerpot base. That went wrong: opening it up I discovered its ferritic magnet (it also had an ac motor) had cracked in half. Both gave years of fun, especially for the kids.
@@Zeratul877 you can actually use the old screensavers on modern windows! You can probably find the screensaver files online, but I just copied them from a windows xp virtual machine.
At the planetarium I worked in years ago we had a number of effects discs (that you had spin direction and speed control over) we could pop in front of any of the 5 beams (R,G,C,B + 16-bit color main)... a variety of diffraction gratings for sparklies, directional blurs etc and the point of this post, shower door glass. Officially (20 years ago anyway) DP32 privacy glass... the discs were cut out by a glazier with the mounting holes... it produced the most fluid *_nebula_* effect that did really neat things when you ran the XY scanners in small patterns...
Alex jones don’t live in Cornwall do you? Everything is bought online else it means journeys like this have to be made. I had other drop offs and places to visit/shop on the way and in Falmouth so don’t assume too much eh?
I’m on my third one of those, lol, they can get a bit whirry after a while but they’re still awesome, there are Chinese versions on aliexpress that do multiple colour options, and have a timer, and are a blu tooth speaker, and do mood sounds like white noise and rain, because of course there are.
Or to protect against sloppy solder blobs touching the shaft. EDIT: it looks like there's a plastic sleeve between the shaft and the solder so that's not the reason.
A little smear of Vaseline can work wonders on things like that! - If your shaft fails to slide or rotate properly, you can smear a thin film on the moving surfaces, even on the gear teeth. I had a problem with my fan, which saw a lot of use last summer (2018), which, when I wanted it this summer was dried out and stiff, and made an awful screaming noise from its bearings - Vaseline soon had it going nice and smoothly again.
break some clear glass marbles and stack on a metal base and a furnace, have a look at any video about glass making. I think the guy who did Grand Designs made glass from scratch on his Shed series, it isn't hard. Or 3D print in transparent filament.
Hey Clive! It's Clive! I've got one of the Argos red laser projectors that deflects the laser with two motorised mirrors! Years ago, I had ant ex-disco Helium Neon laser version! I also have a collection of Chinese lasers from eBay for lighting matches and burning things!
Thanks very much Clive! Very interesting video, I've just booked mine for collection from my local Asda. Very kind of you to point out some troubleshooting tips which may or may not come in handy.
The effect is called lumia, and some of us crazy nutters with Class IIIB or IV lasers do it with way more power than the ones in that little argos unit (I've done it with a 300mW ion laser till it started burning holes in the plastic "crystal"). It'll work with any light source, but looks best with a laser. Any irregularly shaped glass or plastic (for low power lasers) will produce the effect. A good motor to use is a microwave turntable motor run off a variac. Another choice is the motor out of an old fashioned flip clock. You saw the same effect done with the little fireplace lantern your took apart a few videos ago, just done differently :) I thought the COB was a laser diode driver, but they probably had little drivers on the PCB's on the back of the diodes - didn't think about the "boring" RGB LED's (Lasers are way more fun) ;)
I bought one of these after seeing this, not really impressed with the brightness, so I strapped out the resistor in line with the laser diodes, no improvement. They have redesigned it a bit, slightly better main board that now looks like fibre glass, no COB circuit and the lasers are on removable plugs. Always interesting stuff.
4:17 One possible way to make copies of that lens yourself is use silicone molding compound to make a 3D copy of the original lens and then fill the cavity with Epoxy Casting Resin (be VERY careful to ensure there are NO bubbles in the Resin). Polishing the surfaces to a perfect shine may be a pain but a Dremel with a Buffing wheel should help...
use a vibrator to encourage bubbles to rise up through the mould and have a cut off section at the top for them to gather in. If you can reduce the viscosity of your resin, that helps, most there is a solvent that works.
Got one on order to collect from a neighbour town, bit of a drive, but with Big Clive's teardown it's good to know how to fix it before it jams and self destructs!
We used to have boxes full of different squares of bathroom glass to do exactly this, we also used bent pieces of polished metals, sometimes the result from the metal was sent through the glass. It was a real long process to get a good looking effect. We used to put a lot more power through the glass than that though ;)
Used to work in theme park animatronics from machining to molding to casting, so my 2 cents would be... To make the lens Id take some smooth river stones, set them into a domed bit of clay, to a uniformish depth. mold the top (the side facing the ceiling). Once that is cured peal out the clay and stones, then use clay to fill the negative to a uniform depth in the desired shape and thickness, and mold the smooth-ish side taht faces the circuit board. When that is cured, open the two halves, clean out the tool, toss in some clear resin clamp it shut and wait. Ideally youd want to get a smooth a mold as possible, possibly using silicon with a fiberglass backing (2 piece mold). Supposing all the materials play nice in the casting process You should end up with a decent weird laser lens disk. ....I might have to actually try that one of these days next time i have some spare materials laying around... Got plenty of old red lasers laying around.
I have SOAIY aurora version. Exactly the same as the one you dissected. No flicker perhaps because 60hz and no sticking. Less than $25 amazon. Very nice to run two at the same time. Something to disassemble is LaserPod which uses a Swarovski ball faceted crystal to shoot lasers thru, and one that fails because of cheap rubber o-ring drives the Ocean Wave projector which wobbles the light like reflected moving water. Something else that I'd like to see the inner workings are the self contained radar motion detector light bulbs. Motion is sensed with radar and work inside closed globe light fixtures. Thanks for a great channel.
Forgot the forward voltage drop on the diodes. Most not low drop diodes so when a pair conducts, it is 0.7 two times. Voltage is 1.4V less than the calculation would provide with perfect rectification.
1N4007 diodes have, according to the datasheet, a forward voltage drop of about 1V IIRC. For a full-bridge rectifier you need to go through two of those so 14.5V instead of 17 seems about right I guess.
@Mai Mariarti Good point. The 1V drop is at 1A, so at lower current it will be a little less. Still, the point stands, the rectifier is definitely part of the reason why the observed voltage is lower than expected.
@Mai Mariarti Meh, doesn't change that much. And the LEDs and lasers are gonna draw perhaps a few hundred mA. Roughly. The LEDs have to be bright enough to illuminate a ceiling, not just indicators on a button.
The hot melt on the back of the PCB looks like it's there to prevent the LEDs from being shorted out by a piece of metal in the back. A bit surprising that Vince got promoted to crew chief at age 13.
I tried to make some odd lenses like that with varying degrees of success. Got a bakng tray and placed some small clean pebbles (like what you spread outside for walking on) then placed a piece of clear plastic from a cd case over the top (probably polystyrene). Then placed in an oven for about 10 minutes until the plastic had flopped over the pebbles (can't remember the heat but was medium/low). Left to cool before drilling a hole in the centre. The shape was a little odd, but worked ok on one of those rotating disco-light led bulbs. Plenty of opportunity for improvement though; was quite brittle.
These are generically known as "lumia projectors." Have been around using the same basic components since the early '70's (used gas ion lasers back then).
I get hungry everytime i hear bigclive's voice, especially when he is eating or drinking, i just must have some snack also, while watching him take things to bits
Yep, I always think of my own "fool" bridge rectifier that I got all wrong when I was about 10 years old - for some reason I arranged all four diodes "pointing" in a ring. No prizes for guessing what happened when I applied some AC to that! 💥 ☠️ 😁 It was my granddad who decided to call that a "fool bridge rectifier" - I still haven't lived it down to this day. . . . . .
One thing I briefly saw on the bearing bracket was some flashing left over from the moulding process that was pressing down onto the large gear, easy fix for that, cut it off with a sharp knife & sand smooth, and then add grease to lubricate the assembly to keep things moving smoothly... :)
I have one of these on my desk; it is indeed awesome. Not had any problems mechanically other than the power switch being a bit tricky to latch. Occasionally I get some flashing from one of the LED's like it's on the way out. Think I paid about £20 for it a couple of years ago. Probably a lot for what it is, but it's fun.
If the chip is running from a regulated 3.6 v supply, the emitters of the PNP transistors will see 3 volts (0.6 v drop across the BE junction). This voltage won't change even if the AC supply changes. This makes the transistors a constant current supply.
A modification thought. Remove the RGB driver and either pull the transistors down or bypass them entirely. Then replace all the LEDs with the color changing LEDs (that have their own integrated driver). That might make an interesting effect.
Laser diodes don't like high reverse voltage. So they added zener diodes to equalize and limit the voltage across the lasers. If normal diodes were used, the voltage drop would be too big and the resistor would bloiw up.
Heh. Just about did a spit take when you said 1W. First thought was “oh, that’ll be visible with the lights on” followed by “not for very long though” before I finally got around to “that can’t be right.” That was some of the most entertaining mental imagery I’ve experienced until my brain gave up trying to make it all fit.
I used to work at a planetarium that had a similar device to make the auroras. It was from the 80s so it used seed bulbs and a glass coca-cola bottle on slow turntable for a lens.
That emitter resistor in the LED driver transistors provides base bias and negative feedback when conducting. You hinted at "power regulation". The effect is to dynamically prevent saturation of the transistor. P-N-P transistors are notorious for being less robust than their N-P-N cousins.
With this LED driver circuit, and ignoring the 1k resistor in transistor base, you can approximate the LED current with a formula, I = (3.7V (chip supply voltage) - 0.7V (transistor B-E drop))/100 or 120 ohms. It turns out to be 30mA for B/G and 25mA for R.
Poor quality control and or an poor design that was never improved, think it needs a big clive overhaul, ceramic bearings, 10,000 rpm, strobe RGB lasers, etc and then have it running 3 months on 1 2032 battery.
very similar, and in my opinion better effect can be achieved by shining a laser through the mouth of a small bottle with a bit of oil or glycerin coating the bottom and moving around on it. In this way the patterns never repeat.
The lens is probably made like bathroom window panes, with the same way to make the random distorting bubbles. The hot melt glue prevents the shaft from shorting the LED pins. The wobbly angle contributes to the effect, so they built with tolerances that keep most units between boring straight and too cocked to move.
Or the rectangular arch (bearing support?) that sits right below where the LED contacts are. It looks metallic in some of the shots, and it looks like the PC board would screw down right on top of it.
Quite obviously the resistor on the emitter of the PNP transistor is part of a traditional basic current regulator . Fixing the base voltage and subtracting then the base/emitter voltage drop gives the voltage over the resistor. That of course gives the current on the collector (same as on the emitter) regardless of some variation on the collector voltage. Almost nothing new under the sun...
VDC = VAC x 1.4142 when there is no load on the transformer. For a load that is close to the transformer power rating this drops to around x 1.2 which is almost spot on for your measurements
Just managed to bag one from the Argos in Dudley (nowhere near where I live!). There were several available around the Darlington area when I looked a few days ago but getting very hard to find now. Looking forward to trying it out (and repairing it 😁).
Very cool effect. So I just woke up grabbed my phone sat down watching BigClives video, I notice its blurry about the first time he says is that In focus so he hits focus and its still blurry, on my end now I notice it tho and I cant forget, this repeats and goes on throughout video. Then i remember my old eye dr, I was seen by her up until i was 43, she would say have you noticed things up close blurry i said nope I'm good she said well it will happen by 45 years of age she said your lucky most people happens between 40 and 42 but 99.9 percent happens by 45 well I'm 3 months away from 45 years old. The funny part 😁 is I was like focus please, then he would hit focus and um like do it again (talking to my self as if BigClive can here me). So he was focussing and my eyes are going bad. That was funny stuff right there. Dont worry Sir Clive your video is perfect I just need to hold it further away from my eyes. Cheers from Kansas.
Welcome to OLDE. it sucks, I'm not going to candy coat it. the reason they call it your ''Golden Years'' is because your are constantly pissing yourself, what? not yet? remember the 'eye thing' , well all the other stuff that happens are ''Things'' too. have fun, it's a long slow downhill slide from here. I suggest a good lube. Weed.
The resistor at the emitter side is for negative feedback I think, to prevent thermal runaway/unstable current. If the current gets to high, the B-E voltage will get lower (because of the resistor dropping more voltage) -> less current. In amplifiers this is quite common, however for digital circuits its rarely needed.
Adding the resistor in the emitter makes the collector into a constant-current source (or sink with an NPN transistor). As you say, it's a form of negative feedback.
Those synchronous motors had very heavy use in wall, desk, and mantle clocks. If you get one that's set for your current, they're as accurate as you can possibly get, because they get their sync from the 'clock' of the power company. The only time I've heard them slowing down was due to an EU problem where one country was 'sagging' the entire network. (Power frequencies and voltage have to be synchronized between grids)
Yeah, but a) that was like ten minutes in a day or two. Well under 1 percent even then, so still totally suitable for this effect. B) they autocorrected it.
The power grid frequency is actually very unreliable for time measuring, IIRC the British regulations specify ±1% as normal, which means you can get over 14min off in one day, in the age of incredibly cheap and very precise quartz oscillators, it doesn't make any sense to rely on the power grid frequency
TomboXYZ that is not even a little bit true. Whatever the specs say, things start Going Wrong with capital letters around 50.1 or even 50.05. Regulation is typically to 49.95 to 50.05. Aside from that, there are *short* term fluctuations, but they are compensated for over the day or week. Every week is going to be *very* close to 7*24*60*60*50 cycles. wwwhome.ewi.utwente.nl/~ptdeboer/misc/mains.html
@@tomboxyz5564 - I'm in the US - 60 cycles per second. Jasper Janssen is correct, they put in manual corrections as needed. Everything I've read and seen shows that for timekeeping, the clocks are rock solid. They also don't tick - they hum; they also last forever, even without service. I have a customer with one that's 50 some years old, and I just replaced the power cord for it. She promptly put it back on her shelf and plugged it back in. (Not to mention the one in my workroom.)
Why did they mount the cob on a daughter board versus directly on the main board? Seems like it would be easier and cheaper to just get a normal plastic package for the chip.
Oh Big Clive, what are you doing to me, I've just reserved one on the back of seeing this video! There seems to be a few in stock in the Teeside area for anyone who is interested, I've just reserved one at Middlesbrough.
They'd need to have much bigger lenses, and not be as strongly distorting. Or else you wouldn't be able to see a thing. Where what you're after is a sort of nice gentle melting effect. I hear LSD's a lot more expensive these days, but it's probably a more reliable way of warping your vision, and definitely "trippy".
I was wincing slightly as you let the lasers shine at the camera. I guess these particular lasers are low enough power not to cause a problem, but in general lasers are bad news for camera sensors - I've had sensor damage (on an expensive camera) from a club laser before I knew that this could happen, so I appeal to everyone now to be careful... oh yeah and mind your eyes too... I have a couple of these units (not this exact model but very similar) and one of them does stick sometimes on its rotation, so it's useful to know how that might be fixable, thanks.
SkyWizardless that trick would probably be fine in this low power application, but PWM dimming is efficient because the transistor is switched on or off completely and the transition between states is kept as short as possible. By adding the cap you smooth the base current which results in the transistor spending much more time in a partially conducting state. It’ll dissipate a lot more power that way, so something to keep in mind with higher power LED setups.
@@mlenstra That would be true if the transistor was operating as a saturated switch, but it isn't. The resistor in the emitter circuit means this is configured as a constant current source for the LED, the current being determined by the value of the resistor (120R) and the voltage applied across the base/emitter minus the Vbe drop. This will give a peak LED current of approximately 22-23mA in this circuit. This means the transistor operates in it's linear region for the entire on time of the PWM cycle (RBG chip output low). Adding a filtering capacitor reduces the peak base/emitter voltage but maintains the average value, i.e. the transistor remains conducting in it's linear region for longer, but at a reduced current. This means no or at least negligible impact on transistor power dissipation. However thinking about this a bit more I'm becoming doubtful that the RGB chip really has a PWM frequency so low that it would cause flicker. In retrospect it seems more likely that the tiny filter cap after the bridge rectifier is causing such a high ripple voltage that the LEDs are flickering at 100Hz (in the UK). If this were the case the blue LEDs would be the worst affected since they have a higher Vf than red or green.
Just simulated the circuit with some best guesses for components and the ripple will definitely high enough to cause flicker on the blue LEDs, particularly when blue and another colour are switched on together. It maybe that the PWM frequency is a close integer multiple of the line frequency and is causing beating which would make flicker even more obvious. Simply increasing the filter capacitor value may be enough to fix this light.
I've had one of these for many years but have rarely used it because it's always quite disappointing that the LEDs are so dim and the laser light is only red... but your video has made me wonder whether I could simply replace two of the lasers with blue and green ones to get a much more interesting effect, what do you think, Clive?
You could use low power lasers, but not with the existing circuit. You'd need to give them a suitable low voltage supply to allow for the different laser currents.
@@bigclivedotcom thanks for your reply, it has saved me from spending time & money failing at swapping them out, and what you suggest sounds beyond my abilities.
That's a neat take on a pretty old school effect called "Lumia". The effect was actually created around the time that lasers became available, so was originally done with incandescent sources, but the effect you get with laser is especially nice. Here's a video on creating diy Lumia: ruclips.net/video/9k-EjRz6DPA/видео.html
Solid artwork on the back of that calculator. Really fits the theme.
I thought it's Clive's signature! XD
Gotta love Vince and his sharpie modifications!
As simple as your videos are, they can be so complicated sometimes.. that’s what I love about your channel!!!
Nice. Thanks Clive.
And "Thanks" to RUclips for sending the notification, an hour AFTER I found the video in the home-feed, and watched it already.
Am I the only one who read the video title as “Inside the awesome *Argon* laser sphere”, and got very excited at the thought of Clive getting ahold of a high power Argon laser?
YES
Many thanks. I had a cruder ancestor of this for many years - a filament light bulb inside a rotating globe that had different coloured transparent discs. I bought it in Maplin's. It used an ac motor, too. It needed increasing amounts of TLC after several years, mostly involving resetting the position of the motor and its gear. Eventually the lights stayed on one time too often with the globe stuck, so I tore it down (again). The plastic parts inside had disintegrated so I decided to give it an honorary burial. I also had a fibre optic mini Christmas tree which turned a celluloid disc embossed with different designs and colours inside its flowerpot base. That went wrong: opening it up I discovered its ferritic magnet (it also had an ac motor) had cracked in half. Both gave years of fun, especially for the kids.
This thing is like a physical Win 9x screensaver
I wonder if we will ever see those originals again :(
@@Zeratul877 you can actually use the old screensavers on modern windows! You can probably find the screensaver files online, but I just copied them from a windows xp virtual machine.
InstaBlaster.
At the planetarium I worked in years ago we had a number of effects discs (that you had spin direction and speed control over) we could pop in front of any of the 5 beams (R,G,C,B + 16-bit color main)... a variety of diffraction gratings for sparklies, directional blurs etc and the point of this post, shower door glass. Officially (20 years ago anyway) DP32 privacy glass... the discs were cut out by a glazier with the mounting holes... it produced the most fluid *_nebula_* effect that did really neat things when you ran the XY scanners in small patterns...
Just looked on Argos website, out of stock!! What a surprise ! Great vid Clive!
Yep. Can't find any stores with stock in the UK...
Just managed to grab the last one in my area £7.50... Argos Falmouth Cornwall. Driving the 30 mile today to collect. Thanks Clive!!
30 miles for this? How far would you go for something good? Ffs 🤣
Alex jones don’t live in Cornwall do you? Everything is bought online else it means journeys like this have to be made. I had other drop offs and places to visit/shop on the way and in Falmouth so don’t assume too much eh?
I’m on my third one of those, lol, they can get a bit whirry after a while but they’re still awesome, there are Chinese versions on aliexpress that do multiple colour options, and have a timer, and are a blu tooth speaker, and do mood sounds like white noise and rain, because of course there are.
You bought 3 of them? How intriguing. I'm so interested, why would someone ever buy one, let alone replace 2 broken ones?
Andrew Delashaw because they like them, Andrew, because they like them
@@xenonram because he CAN !! hahaha
Hello again bezier, my old friend. I haven't seen you since the 90s!
Saw an advert on Facebook for that "transformers" light you had and there was a snippet of your video in it.
That seems to happen a lot.
Maybe the glue is used as a insulation to keep the pins from shorting out on the case of the motor
Or to protect against sloppy solder blobs touching the shaft. EDIT: it looks like there's a plastic sleeve between the shaft and the solder so that's not the reason.
That was my thought, just as a better safe than sorry kind of deal.
£7.50 in our local Argos as a clearance item.
Cant get one sold out for miles for me
same, sold out. I would definitely buy at that price.
Bought one, it ran for 2 mins then stopped spinning, took it back. When will I learn lol
None near me... 🙁
I wish they sold it on eBay or lived in the UK 🇬🇧
A little smear of Vaseline can work wonders on things like that! - If your shaft fails to slide or rotate properly, you can smear a thin film on the moving surfaces, even on the gear teeth. I had a problem with my fan, which saw a lot of use last summer (2018), which, when I wanted it this summer was dried out and stiff, and made an awful screaming noise from its bearings - Vaseline soon had it going nice and smoothly again.
That IS far-out AND cosmic!!!
Yeah... that was my first thought on seeing the lens too: "oooh... I wonder if/how you could make one of those"
break some clear glass marbles and stack on a metal base and a furnace, have a look at any video about glass making. I think the guy who did Grand Designs made glass from scratch on his Shed series, it isn't hard. Or 3D print in transparent filament.
Hey Clive! It's Clive! I've got one of the Argos red laser projectors that deflects the laser with two motorised mirrors! Years ago, I had ant ex-disco Helium Neon laser version! I also have a collection of Chinese lasers from eBay for lighting matches and burning things!
Thanks very much Clive! Very interesting video, I've just booked mine for collection from my local Asda. Very kind of you to point out some troubleshooting tips which may or may not come in handy.
The effect is called lumia, and some of us crazy nutters with Class IIIB or IV lasers do it with way more power than the ones in that little argos unit (I've done it with a 300mW ion laser till it started burning holes in the plastic "crystal"). It'll work with any light source, but looks best with a laser. Any irregularly shaped glass or plastic (for low power lasers) will produce the effect. A good motor to use is a microwave turntable motor run off a variac. Another choice is the motor out of an old fashioned flip clock. You saw the same effect done with the little fireplace lantern your took apart a few videos ago, just done differently :) I thought the COB was a laser diode driver, but they probably had little drivers on the PCB's on the back of the diodes - didn't think about the "boring" RGB LED's (Lasers are way more fun) ;)
I bought one of these after seeing this, not really impressed with the brightness, so I strapped out the resistor in line with the laser diodes, no improvement. They have redesigned it a bit, slightly better main board that now looks like fibre glass, no COB circuit and the lasers are on removable plugs. Always interesting stuff.
4:17 One possible way to make copies of that lens yourself is use silicone molding compound to make a 3D copy of the original lens and then fill the cavity with Epoxy Casting Resin (be VERY careful to ensure there are NO bubbles in the Resin).
Polishing the surfaces to a perfect shine may be a pain but a Dremel with a Buffing wheel should help...
use a vibrator to encourage bubbles to rise up through the mould and have a cut off section at the top for them to gather in. If you can reduce the viscosity of your resin, that helps, most there is a solvent that works.
Wow! That's a super cool effect!
Got one on order to collect from a neighbour town, bit of a drive, but with Big Clive's teardown it's good to know how to fix it before it jams and self destructs!
We used to have boxes full of different squares of bathroom glass to do exactly this, we also used bent pieces of polished metals, sometimes the result from the metal was sent through the glass. It was a real long process to get a good looking effect. We used to put a lot more power through the glass than that though ;)
Used to work in theme park animatronics from machining to molding to casting, so my 2 cents would be...
To make the lens Id take some smooth river stones, set them into a domed bit of clay, to a uniformish depth. mold the top (the side facing the ceiling). Once that is cured peal out the clay and stones, then use clay to fill the negative to a uniform depth in the desired shape and thickness, and mold the smooth-ish side taht faces the circuit board. When that is cured, open the two halves, clean out the tool, toss in some clear resin clamp it shut and wait. Ideally youd want to get a smooth a mold as possible, possibly using silicon with a fiberglass backing (2 piece mold). Supposing all the materials play nice in the casting process You should end up with a decent weird laser lens disk.
....I might have to actually try that one of these days next time i have some spare materials laying around... Got plenty of old red lasers laying around.
Oddly enough I was looking at this while browsing the Argos app the other day.
I have SOAIY aurora version. Exactly the same as the one you dissected. No flicker perhaps because 60hz and no sticking. Less than $25 amazon. Very nice to run two at the same time. Something to disassemble is LaserPod which uses a Swarovski ball faceted crystal to shoot lasers thru, and one that fails because of cheap rubber o-ring drives the Ocean Wave projector which wobbles the light like reflected moving water.
Something else that I'd like to see the inner workings are the self contained radar motion detector light bulbs. Motion is sensed with radar and work inside closed globe light fixtures. Thanks for a great channel.
Search my videos for keywords like radar and Doppler to see a few videos about those detectors.
ARGOS
, entertaining high people for years!
Forgot the forward voltage drop on the diodes. Most not low drop diodes so when a pair conducts, it is 0.7 two times. Voltage is 1.4V less than the calculation would provide with perfect rectification.
This is the first Truly cool thing, that I wish I could buy here
Similar motors are used on automatic ice makers in refrigerators, but with an even lower gearing to allow for more torque.
1N4007 diodes have, according to the datasheet, a forward voltage drop of about 1V IIRC. For a full-bridge rectifier you need to go through two of those so 14.5V instead of 17 seems about right I guess.
@Mai Mariarti Good point. The 1V drop is at 1A, so at lower current it will be a little less. Still, the point stands, the rectifier is definitely part of the reason why the observed voltage is lower than expected.
@Mai Mariarti Meh, doesn't change that much. And the LEDs and lasers are gonna draw perhaps a few hundred mA. Roughly. The LEDs have to be bright enough to illuminate a ceiling, not just indicators on a button.
The hot melt on the back of the PCB looks like it's there to prevent the LEDs from being shorted out by a piece of metal in the back.
A bit surprising that Vince got promoted to crew chief at age 13.
my guess is his beard is crew chief and he'll get the title when he scores with a woman, man or any mammal not usually found in sausages...
I tried to make some odd lenses like that with varying degrees of success. Got a bakng tray and placed some small clean pebbles (like what you spread outside for walking on) then placed a piece of clear plastic from a cd case over the top (probably polystyrene). Then placed in an oven for about 10 minutes until the plastic had flopped over the pebbles (can't remember the heat but was medium/low). Left to cool before drilling a hole in the centre. The shape was a little odd, but worked ok on one of those rotating disco-light led bulbs. Plenty of opportunity for improvement though; was quite brittle.
These are generically known as "lumia projectors." Have been around using the same basic components since the early '70's (used gas ion lasers back then).
Combine part of a shower door, a clock motor, and a spectra 171. Don't look directly into the trap.
actually lumia predates the invention of the laser by quite a bit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumia_art
I may experiment with baking chunks of acrylic in a circular plaster mould in an oven to produce such a randomised texture lens.
lol, like the way he pronounces "full bridge rectifier" 😆
He's imitating ElectroBOOM. Check out his channel. He does Electro... with lots of BOOM!
eta: And lots of ~BLEEPS~
I get hungry everytime i hear bigclive's voice, especially when he is eating or drinking, i just must have some snack also, while watching him take things to bits
Yep, I always think of my own "fool" bridge rectifier that I got all wrong when I was about 10 years old - for some reason I arranged all four diodes "pointing" in a ring. No prizes for guessing what happened when I applied some AC to that! 💥 ☠️ 😁
It was my granddad who decided to call that a "fool bridge rectifier" - I still haven't lived it down to this day. . . . . .
One thing I briefly saw on the bearing bracket was some flashing left over from the moulding process that was pressing down onto the large gear, easy fix for that, cut it off with a sharp knife & sand smooth, and then add grease to lubricate the assembly to keep things moving smoothly... :)
I have one of these on my desk; it is indeed awesome. Not had any problems mechanically other than the power switch being a bit tricky to latch. Occasionally I get some flashing from one of the LED's like it's on the way out. Think I paid about £20 for it a couple of years ago. Probably a lot for what it is, but it's fun.
If the chip is running from a regulated 3.6 v supply, the emitters of the PNP transistors will see 3 volts (0.6 v drop across the BE junction). This voltage won't change even if the AC supply changes. This makes the transistors a constant current supply.
Get some clay, make the basic disc shape and press in some dimples, then fill with clear resin..
@Mai Mariarti I've watched a lot of arty and model maker channels and non have used vacuum chambers and still got crystal clear results
There are shower doors that have a lumpy texture like this lights lens, we used the same idea to simulate aurora at a planetarium
Transparent textured plexiglass works pretty well for this purpose. I've been experimenting with these effects for quite some time now.
More natural if you use real gravel to mimic the shape of the dimples.
@Mai Mariarti Bubbles might add to the effect.
A modification thought. Remove the RGB driver and either pull the transistors down or bypass them entirely. Then replace all the LEDs with the color changing LEDs (that have their own integrated driver). That might make an interesting effect.
Haven’t seen one in Australia. Cool effect
Laser diodes don't like high reverse voltage. So they added zener diodes to equalize and limit the voltage across the lasers. If normal diodes were used, the voltage drop would be too big and the resistor would bloiw up.
Great video Big Clive
Heh. Just about did a spit take when you said 1W. First thought was “oh, that’ll be visible with the lights on” followed by “not for very long though” before I finally got around to “that can’t be right.” That was some of the most entertaining mental imagery I’ve experienced until my brain gave up trying to make it all fit.
When you said it had been discontinued, I assumed it was because the lasers posed some kind of danger.
I used to work at a planetarium that had a similar device to make the auroras. It was from the 80s so it used seed bulbs and a glass coca-cola bottle on slow turntable for a lens.
9:36 - Probably to avoid shorting them when the whole thing is mounted (is the bracket made of metal?).
That emitter resistor in the LED driver transistors provides base bias and negative feedback when conducting. You hinted at "power regulation". The effect is to dynamically prevent saturation of the transistor. P-N-P transistors are notorious for being less robust than their N-P-N cousins.
the hot snot is to insulate the POS against shorting on the central metal stand.
With this LED driver circuit, and ignoring the 1k resistor in transistor base, you can approximate the LED current with a formula, I = (3.7V (chip supply voltage) - 0.7V (transistor B-E drop))/100 or 120 ohms. It turns out to be 30mA for B/G and 25mA for R.
Poor quality control and or an poor design that was never improved, think it needs a big clive overhaul, ceramic bearings, 10,000 rpm, strobe RGB lasers, etc and then have it running 3 months on 1 2032 battery.
Also more powerful lasers. It's not a real laser if you don't need eye protection.
I call it the pocket-rave
Nice loose rotating shaft as well...
@@gcewing Hmph. Lightweight. It's not a real laser if your walls and ceiling aren't smoldering.
Wicked cool video Big Clive
That'll make a very interesting bike light. [Hello police? There's a UFO flying low through the park!] Probably get me killed too.
They refer to that morphing effect as lumia in laser circles.
I appreciate your time and knowledge. Id love to see who wins in a game of rock paper scissors with the other" hands ". Hands on learning lol
very similar, and in my opinion better effect can be achieved by shining a laser through the mouth of a small bottle with a bit of oil or glycerin coating the bottom and moving around on it. In this way the patterns never repeat.
Melt some marbles to the point the glass just starts to flow may give you the effect ?
The lens is probably made like bathroom window panes, with the same way to make the random distorting bubbles. The hot melt glue prevents the shaft from shorting the LED pins. The wobbly angle contributes to the effect, so they built with tolerances that keep most units between boring straight and too cocked to move.
I had to look up the phrase, "toilet glass" as I've never heard it before. :-)
Clive the silicon on the bottom of the LED's is probably in case they touch on the metal case of the driver motor
It isn't silicon (a brittle element) and it isn't silicone, either. It's hot-melt adhesive.
Or the rectangular arch (bearing support?) that sits right below where the LED contacts are. It looks metallic in some of the shots, and it looks like the PC board would screw down right on top of it.
@@manolisgledsodakis873 how can you tell?
Quite obviously the resistor on the emitter of the PNP transistor is part of a traditional basic current regulator . Fixing the base voltage and subtracting then the base/emitter voltage drop gives the voltage over the resistor. That of course gives the current on the collector (same as on the emitter) regardless of some variation on the collector voltage. Almost nothing new under the sun...
VDC = VAC x 1.4142 when there is no load on the transformer. For a load that is close to the transformer power rating this drops to around x 1.2 which is almost spot on for your measurements
Just managed to bag one from the Argos in Dudley (nowhere near where I live!). There were several available around the Darlington area when I looked a few days ago but getting very hard to find now. Looking forward to trying it out (and repairing it 😁).
Gordon's alive! 🌌⚡😂
Soooooo... when do you replace those puny lasers with proper professionor lasers?
Didn't the Ferengi use one of those to control Picard's mind?
That was a much larger unit that the Chinese reverse engineered and reproduced.
Was that when they used to wear fur waistcoats and carry whip lasers? Star Trek you warped my fragile childlike mind.
No these were the gaming devices that altered the laws of probability on DS9.
Very cool effect.
So I just woke up grabbed my phone sat down watching BigClives video, I notice its blurry about the first time he says is that In focus so he hits focus and its still blurry, on my end now I notice it tho and I cant forget, this repeats and goes on throughout video. Then i remember my old eye dr, I was seen by her up until i was 43, she would say have you noticed things up close blurry i said nope I'm good she said well it will happen by 45 years of age she said your lucky most people happens between 40 and 42 but 99.9 percent happens by 45 well I'm 3 months away from 45 years old. The funny part 😁 is I was like focus please, then he would hit focus and um like do it again (talking to my self as if BigClive can here me). So he was focussing and my eyes are going bad. That was funny stuff right there. Dont worry Sir Clive your video is perfect I just need to hold it further away from my eyes. Cheers from Kansas.
Welcome to OLDE. it sucks, I'm not going to candy coat it. the reason they call it your ''Golden Years'' is because your are constantly pissing yourself, what? not yet? remember the 'eye thing' , well all the other stuff that happens are ''Things'' too. have fun, it's a long slow downhill slide from here. I suggest a good lube. Weed.
cholesterol, prostate exams, rectal exams, colonoscopy, just some of the magical words you too will learn. and hate.
@@RIXRADvidz just like that huh, it just seemed over night thats all. LOL do i bring the lube for the dr or do they supply.
The resistor at the emitter side is for negative feedback I think, to prevent thermal runaway/unstable current. If the current gets to high, the B-E voltage will get lower (because of the resistor dropping more voltage) -> less current.
In amplifiers this is quite common, however for digital circuits its rarely needed.
Adding the resistor in the emitter makes the collector into a constant-current source (or sink with an NPN transistor). As you say, it's a form of negative feedback.
just a note, I have a 65 inch screen at a resolution of 4096 x 2160 and the quality looks just fine :)
Those synchronous motors had very heavy use in wall, desk, and mantle clocks. If you get one that's set for your current, they're as accurate as you can possibly get, because they get their sync from the 'clock' of the power company. The only time I've heard them slowing down was due to an EU problem where one country was 'sagging' the entire network. (Power frequencies and voltage have to be synchronized between grids)
Yeah, but a) that was like ten minutes in a day or two. Well under 1 percent even then, so still totally suitable for this effect. B) they autocorrected it.
The power grid frequency is actually very unreliable for time measuring, IIRC the British regulations specify ±1% as normal, which means you can get over 14min off in one day, in the age of incredibly cheap and very precise quartz oscillators, it doesn't make any sense to rely on the power grid frequency
TomboXYZ that is not even a little bit true. Whatever the specs say, things start Going Wrong with capital letters around 50.1 or even 50.05. Regulation is typically to 49.95 to 50.05.
Aside from that, there are *short* term fluctuations, but they are compensated for over the day or week. Every week is going to be *very* close to 7*24*60*60*50 cycles.
wwwhome.ewi.utwente.nl/~ptdeboer/misc/mains.html
@@tomboxyz5564 - I'm in the US - 60 cycles per second. Jasper Janssen is correct, they put in manual corrections as needed. Everything I've read and seen shows that for timekeeping, the clocks are rock solid. They also don't tick - they hum; they also last forever, even without service. I have a customer with one that's 50 some years old, and I just replaced the power cord for it. She promptly put it back on her shelf and plugged it back in. (Not to mention the one in my workroom.)
Why did they mount the cob on a daughter board versus directly on the main board? Seems like it would be easier and cheaper to just get a normal plastic package for the chip.
spindle might have been the word you were looking for.
I've had that light for over 5 years. I've always wanted to take it apart and now I don't have to.
Something tells me these laser modules are the ones where the die is directly soldered to the PCB. Look it up on eBay, you can get them VERY cheap.
What about covering the new Sonoff mini? Would be interessting to see wheter it is safe to use in an european household.
Dear lord I want one. *BAD*
Oh Big Clive, what are you doing to me, I've just reserved one on the back of seeing this video! There seems to be a few in stock in the Teeside area for anyone who is interested, I've just reserved one at Middlesbrough.
I'd be interested in some trippy specs made with a pair those diffusion lenses.
They'd need to have much bigger lenses, and not be as strongly distorting. Or else you wouldn't be able to see a thing. Where what you're after is a sort of nice gentle melting effect.
I hear LSD's a lot more expensive these days, but it's probably a more reliable way of warping your vision, and definitely "trippy".
the pillar from the motor could be called the " Spindle " ???
The hot melt glue? Simple Clive. They knew you were getting it and wanted to stop you from changing the LEDs to other colours! ;o)
Nice one
I call those linear power supplies 'wall-warts'. Interesting product. Thanx.
I was wincing slightly as you let the lasers shine at the camera. I guess these particular lasers are low enough power not to cause a problem, but in general lasers are bad news for camera sensors - I've had sensor damage (on an expensive camera) from a club laser before I knew that this could happen, so I appeal to everyone now to be careful... oh yeah and mind your eyes too...
I have a couple of these units (not this exact model but very similar) and one of them does stick sometimes on its rotation, so it's useful to know how that might be fixable, thanks.
Some years ago a company sold a 'laserpod', the same principle but much higher quality. Pity they don't do them any more :(
Hi bigclive! Can you please do a half bridge driven poundland vibrator that sings Gedeon Bácsi by Széchi Pál with this lamp as visualisation?
What if you add capacitor to output of the rgb chip, might stop some of the shimmer
Subtract 1.4 volts!
Good call.
Came to say this lol!
Oh of course! Bridge rectifier forward voltage :D I couldn't fathom this for a second
@@azyfloof
Yep plus transformer impedance. . .
A small value cap (maybe 1u or so) across the 10k pull-up resistor on each transistor should filter most of the flicker out.
SkyWizardless that trick would probably be fine in this low power application, but PWM dimming is efficient because the transistor is switched on or off completely and the transition between states is kept as short as possible. By adding the cap you smooth the base current which results in the transistor spending much more time in a partially conducting state. It’ll dissipate a lot more power that way, so something to keep in mind with higher power LED setups.
@@mlenstra That would be true if the transistor was operating as a saturated switch, but it isn't. The resistor in the emitter circuit means this is configured as a constant current source for the LED, the current being determined by the value of the resistor (120R) and the voltage applied across the base/emitter minus the Vbe drop. This will give a peak LED current of approximately 22-23mA in this circuit.
This means the transistor operates in it's linear region for the entire on time of the PWM cycle (RBG chip output low). Adding a filtering capacitor reduces the peak base/emitter voltage but maintains the average value, i.e. the transistor remains conducting in it's linear region for longer, but at a reduced current. This means no or at least negligible impact on transistor power dissipation.
However thinking about this a bit more I'm becoming doubtful that the RGB chip really has a PWM frequency so low that it would cause flicker. In retrospect it seems more likely that the tiny filter cap after the bridge rectifier is causing such a high ripple voltage that the LEDs are flickering at 100Hz (in the UK). If this were the case the blue LEDs would be the worst affected since they have a higher Vf than red or green.
Just simulated the circuit with some best guesses for components and the ripple will definitely high enough to cause flicker on the blue LEDs, particularly when blue and another colour are switched on together. It maybe that the PWM frequency is a close integer multiple of the line frequency and is causing beating which would make flicker even more obvious. Simply increasing the filter capacitor value may be enough to fix this light.
SkyWizardless ah, I completely missed the fact that the transistor is already operating in its linear region due to the resistor. My bad!
I got one of these for my cats and they were interested in it for approximately 0 seconds.
I've had one of these for many years but have rarely used it because it's always quite disappointing that the LEDs are so dim and the laser light is only red... but your video has made me wonder whether I could simply replace two of the lasers with blue and green ones to get a much more interesting effect, what do you think, Clive?
You could use low power lasers, but not with the existing circuit. You'd need to give them a suitable low voltage supply to allow for the different laser currents.
@@bigclivedotcom thanks for your reply, it has saved me from spending time & money failing at swapping them out, and what you suggest sounds beyond my abilities.
Cool. You fine the coolest stuff.
1. Voltage loss across rectumfriar
2. Misaligned holes the shaft is trying to spin in.
I recognized that nightcore tube the second he clicked it twice to go full send xD
Be worth fitting a 470uf 25v cap after bridge to see if that stabalizes the lasers. I suspect the 220uf is for American 110v supply.
10:12 *FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER* Did I just witness an ElectroBoom reference?
As he's done several times before.
That's a neat take on a pretty old school effect called "Lumia". The effect was actually created around the time that lasers became available, so was originally done with incandescent sources, but the effect you get with laser is especially nice.
Here's a video on creating diy Lumia: ruclips.net/video/9k-EjRz6DPA/видео.html
That video was great, thanks for the link!
£7.50 (reduced from £25), there is one in stock near me - I am tempted!
Can you all stop buying them for a couple of weeks til I get paid again please?