DIY Powered Gyroscopes

today I'm vinodilidan there has been a whole genre of physics toys that I have been neglecting to talk about for years gyroscope foreign if you're watching this video then most likely at some point in your life you have already seen a gyroscope in action or have played with one yourself and they're really interesting devices from an engineering standpoint there's not much mechanically to them the most important part of a gyroscope is of course the flywheel which is the usually circular mass that rotates on an axis like this now the basic premise of a gyroscope is that the portions of Mass on the flywheel want to keep going in the same direction so for example if the wheel is rotating this way this portion of mass wants to continue going this direction this portion of mass here wants to continue going in this direction and then of course when we apply torques to the flywheel interesting things happen which gives us the field of gyroscopics so let's go ahead and see one of the most easily demonstrated features of a gyroscope and that is procession now with the gyroscope still like this of course it falls down no problem because gravity is pulling it that way to set the gyroscope I'm going to go ahead and use this rotary tool as a little rubber nub on it and give it a good amount of speed [Music] I think we can go uh the maximum on this [Music] and if I let it go we feel the effects of uh gyroscopic recession in action not as I said this is an unpowered gyroscope and of course needs an external mechanical force applied to it to get it going well I want to talk more in this video about do-it-yourself power gyroscopes and I've made a few so this one I call the dry angle and if I touch the two contacts here let me see it spin up same thing with this little gyroscope I built and this uses the motor stator mechanism from a pancake VCR motor has too little human cells if I turn it on let me see it start up I don't know I really just have found a computer DC brushless fans to make very good gyroscope frames not only because you have a brushless motor it doesn't have a commentator but also you have a nice frame to put your batteries around so this is the one that I put together and it does pretty much the same thing as our unpowered gyroscope here so let's go ahead and turn this on we'll let it start up we'll move this one off the string and this one is astonishingly quiet I mean like no sound it's it's quiet I'm gonna put it on the post and uh we'll see how this one behaves in contrast to the uh the unpowered gyroscope ready just like that does the same thing well this is a technical Channel and I found power gyroscopes to be actually more difficult to build than I thought so in this video I'm going to discuss some design considerations for you so that way you can build your own gyroscope that's powered at home easily and effectively every physics fan should have a gyroscope especially a power gyroscope I mean these these things are just they're so much fun and they're magical they really are magical devices so that's what we're going to do in this video we're gonna uh discuss power gyroscopes wow that tip is digging into my finger now because this is a video about power gyroscopes we'll have to select what I call a winner winner flywheel spinner and in order to help with that I want to discuss three different types of electric motor the first type I want to discuss is the DC brushed motor and these have some advantages and disadvantages now some of the adventures are they're easy to find and easy to use they usually just have two electrical connections you hook up your battery or whatnot and they spin another Advantage is they have great low speed starting torque so normally they'll start a flywheel up pretty quickly now to discuss some of the disadvantages I want to go over what's inside of one of these electric motors as soon as I open it up almost here we go and on the inside we can see the Armature uh the point that beats electricity into the Armature and so on this side we have these little metal fins these are called brushes and they make contact with What's called the commutator though combinator ring has these fins of metal that are the electrical connection to these three electromagnets on the Armature well one thing to know is when these motors are starting up they often draw more current than they do when they're running underneath their normal conditions so when the uh when the mass of the flywheel is starting up if it takes a while it can often put additional stress on the brushes and the motor and burn it out quicker another disadvantage is most of these motors do not have true roller bearings or ball bearings inside but instead have oil impregnated bronze bushings you can see one of them underneath the brushes there and on this side you can see another oil impregnated bronze pushing so they're not the best but they do work pretty well enjoy that I have one of these little DC brushed motors from a CD-ROM drive and for my flywheel I have the flywheel from a cassette player so feed some power into that let's open it up and of course you just connect a little like lithium-ion battery up to this and it'll work pretty well go ahead give that some speed power not touch the flywheel and sure enough pretty crude gyroscope well not much to using one of these brush DC motors the second type of motor I want to discuss is the brushless motor that's found inside of a computer blower fan oh one of the things you want to watch out for is something with high power so you want a high wattage let's take a look at the numbers here and figure out what the log it is we can see it's 12 volts and at point two two amps so not a full amp on a quarter of an amp so a quarter times 12 that would give us roughly three Watts so let's see what the performance of this fan is go ahead put Power into that bring it up go ahead and touch that there's not much power behind that at all oh another thing to watch out for is that some fans don't want to start if you put a lot of weight on them that's just to prevent them from burning out and something built into the fan motor controller well let's take a look at a fan that's much smaller well you can take a look at the wattage on that and what we have here is 12 volts once again at a little over and a half an amp now we'll do the rough math on here and say this gives us about six Watts so about double the power of the fan that I just showed you we'll go ahead and put Power into here and I'm sure you'll see there's a bit of a difference between the two right away already louder and uh blowing more air I don't want to talk to that fan [Music] there are some other considerations to take into account when you're using the brushless motors from computers like this let's take a look at the physical build of the fan as well so we can see here that it has the post for the um for the rotor it's just in the plastic like that so not structurally that strong and there's no ball bearings in here so probably also just the oil impregnated bronze bushings or the mag lab bearings but uh the ones you really want to watch out for are the ones that are metal here and have ball bearings especially two ball bearings that's because they can take the lateral force a bit better let's take a look at a couple of things I want to show you and we got uh a couple of things here so this is what's inside of one of those fans you see that there's a bearing here if I flip it over there's another bearing there the nice thing about ball bearings like this is unlike the the bushings they can take a fair bit of lateral Force like this and not fail whereas uh sometimes the bushings will fail pretty quickly and you'll hear these they go when you got a failing computer fan quite annoying um let's take a look at these two right here now these have some structural advantages they're fully metal here and a plastic fan blade assembly sits on the top but even these two are a little different well you'll notice that this one is just a piece of sheet steel that's been pressed and stamped and of course it really doesn't have any kind of structure to it so if there's any kind of wobble all over the long duration it has a tendency of getting loose in that section and then of course it just pops off whereas we take a look at this we can see that there actually is another embedded section of what appears to be brass and that's far more structural than just the regular stamped sheet metal alone so this right here along with the two ball bearings and a high wattage are what you're going to be looking for for the best performance from one of these fans and you know what let's go ahead and actually uh plug this one in connected up see how well it works it might be a good uh a good fan oh no yeah there's really not much torque there at all is there um rather disappointing well that's no good take a look at this one and see how well it works it's not as structurally sound but maybe it has a little bit more wattage of course we can always test it by the current going in the fan as well you know that's a little stronger but I think that if we're gonna make any kind of decision using a fan motor this one meets all the criteria that uh would be best so not only is it a fairly High wattage fan but it also has a fully metal you know closed magnet has a nice reinforced brass piece that's put in there probably also dual ball bearing I hope so it's also fairly thick which means the bearing should be spaced out pretty decently it's even thicker than this right here so the further space out the bearings are the easier it's going to take that lateral torque like this [Music] um the last type of motor I want to discuss here is the three-phase motor so let's take a look at some of those the easiest three-phase motor to find is usually from a CD-ROM drive like this if they still make them in your neck of the woods kind of obsolete technology now some of these motors don't want to pull apart very easy at all or be modified they have some special Voodoo in them that holds them together but sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll find one said pull apart pretty easy like this now these also have advantages and disadvantages a lot like the brush motors they can have some pretty good starting torque uh the disadvantages are on a lot of these is they don't have the ball bearings and you need a fancy electronic speed controller in most cases to run these now I will say there is a simple circuit that uses like uh What uh one potentiometer six diodes three mosfets and maybe a couple of resistors that will also run these as well but they have severe limitations the circuits do not do not give us the best option it's best to use an ESC but I might try to use these motors instead with one of those little simple how you doing drivers looks pretty structural I have two of them that uh match so you know you could probably put two Motors on there and have our flywheel wedged between so that would give us some power on both sides wow that is not very center um I see there's an obstruction okay so we'd have two Motors giving us twice the power so that's also something to consider um but these aren't the easiest to use by any means uh and if I go with the simple three mosfet driver I'll have to wire these up for start configuration and not uh triangle Delta configuration once again there's limitations um but the fan motors they're great if you're going to build your own power gyroscope disease I do want to make one thing very clear and this is just from my own experience so let me show you something here you see this uh this used to be a gyroscope in progress this is where I learned that these are incredibly dangerous Motors to use especially for gyroscopes well I want to show you something right on my hand here I don't know if you can see it or not but there is a scar that goes across this way well that's because I was holding this and I was driving it with an electronic speed controller at about 18 or so volts uh and I had this thing going I want to say at about what um 20 000 RPM 1700 normal so a little over double the speed of what these are rated for now there's one major concern to watch out for and if you have any experience with any kind of clutch or any kind of drum brake system you're going to instantly get why this is so dangerous I want to point out something no if you take a look at where the rotor spins and this section right here there is hardly any space and this goes down about another four millimeters inside of this uh this hose for the uh the magnetic assembly here um well what ended up happening is I got the motor going so fast that the uh the aluminum that was holding the ceramic bearing gave way and it expanded outwards now of course that acted like a clutch and put all of the power of the five or so platters of the gyroscope into the outside of the frame of course this spun the frame like this now even though it had caught my finger significantly badly and I was bleeding all over making a profuse mess with my own body fluids uh the thing that caught me off guard was that it was spinning so fast the wires that were connected to the electronic speed controller went supersonic it sounded like a firework blew off in my hand similar results too um but yes these motors are quite dangerous they're also quite dangerous too because if you tilt them um like this they can put flex on the axle and it can also make contact that way so if you're gonna make any kind of super high speed gyroscope super high speed project be mindful of these motors they can clutch up right away oh a funny anecdote well I remember uh my friend Damian um he had a hard drive failing his computer catastrophically so he calls me up one day he goes Patrick my computer made a bang sound and knocked itself over this is what that's the how well I got over to his you know place I listened to the hard drive and it didn't spin up or anything else like that so I decided to take it apart well the bearing had seized and he had one of those hard drives that it had say uh three or four platters on the inside well once again uh when it locked up all the force that was stored in these platters was delivered to the outside of the hard drive and it kicked over like this which hit the side of this computer with so much force it then did it and knocked it over uh really freaky occurrence but yeah um no one trust these motors they're not the best um the safer alternative is to try to use something maybe like this or from a drone um very simple uh three-phase motor to use this one is from a projector it held the color wheel on it but it's much safer because you don't have any kind of risk of that spreading out and causing any kind of clutch action happening so safer motor than an outer race same thing like this it can't uh can't clutch out against anything so something to consider all things to consider for choosing on your motor um now with that said let's go into discussing flywheels at this point I have two GC brushless motors already selected pretty much prepared for a flywheel all I have to do is figure out now what I'm going to use as my flywheel so with that in consideration I want to show you two different objects both of them are about 45 millimeters in diameter both of them are made of steel this one right here is a washer and this one right here is a stack of Steel laminated sections from a stepper motor so you can see where that went in now there are three things to consider for your gyroscope flywheel properties the first one is this speed second one is the material intensity and then the third one is the material distribution so we can already see some differences of course the material density is going to be about the same they're both steel the distribution of the material is different though then we can take a look here we can see that the distribution is pretty even going from the inside to the outside but this isn't we have these cutouts here the lack of material with most of the material math distributed along the outside area here now what about their weight well let's figure what that is I want to use about 20 grams this one is about 30 grams so uh this one is two-thirds the weight of this one so yeah which one of these objects would be a better flywheel well let's discuss flywheels a little bit more the most easiest flywheel to find just your basic disc like this I got three discs here and I found that washers aren't really the best but but I found works really well actually is if you get the one disc from a speaker magnet like a subwoofer this is from one of those um they make pretty hefty flywheels so pretty easy to find those if you collect speaker junk well let's take a look at these three flywheels or discs this one is a aluminum hard drive platter so we're gonna take a look at it the the evenness of the material density or whatnot distribution is pretty much the same all the way through um same thing with all of these even material density distribution 23 grams so that's fairly light um but it has a lot of the math on the outside it's pretty wide so for this flywheel you have to Sprint it up pretty fast in order to get significant gyroscopic effects let's take a look at this one it's about the same physical size as the platter here but what's the weight on this about 90 grams so about 3.5 times heavier so in order to get the same gyroscopic effects from this lighter plate lighter disc and you would spin this one slower you get more uh gyroscopic effects and a slower rotation speed and you have this one right here well what's uh what's the weight on this one about 70 well these two a pretty close weight now this one is smaller in diameter and uh that means that in order to get the theme gyroscopic effects from this one if you would this one you need to spin this one faster because you don't have the material towards a wider diameter further away from the Central Point anybody who's been in a miracle realm will know that if you're in the center you hardly feel any of the effects but further out you go more you want to feel that sensation of being thrown off the merry-go-roundable same thing happens here the further out from Center your weight is the better and you can see that in many different um too many different flywheel masses this is another uh convenient thing to use a flywheel and it has the magnet and the folded over stamp steel section A lot of Mass on the outside fairly easy to mount on many Motors it's good if you don't have anything else laying around let me show you some of the pre-built gyroscopes again and maybe you'll notice something they all have in common we'll take these three now you'll notice on the VHS VCR read head mechanism that we have a raised outside edge allowing me periphery of the flywheel so we got more mass along the outside once again the characteristic we want to see using this data section from one of the pancake Motors in the VCR once again we have a bit of Mass on the outside so that's nice it's even uh even more narrow here these plates that have the mounting screw holes not all the plates are like that none of them go down further and uh they're Hollow so even less Mass there so excellent and then this you'll notice I left a copper on this one um the reason why I left the copper on is because copper adds additional weight it's a fairly heavy material and of course it's on the outside of the flywheel radius uh you can also see what I mean so you see how many stacks are right here versus the what two of them here now that's what I mean less uh less of these disc laminated steel sections actually have these screw these three um holes so yeah very very good flywheel to use very efficient um so let me show you what I've selected for my fly wheels that I think I'm going to use those would be this uh this now I mean uh with the masses on this let's see uh like about 90-ish 88. that's uh significantly lighter maybe like half the weight oh well more than I thought it's about 60. Okay so this one weighs two thirds as much as this one does uh roughly so I have to spin this one faster but this one is going to be our more efficient flywheel because we have more of the mass on the outside and uh the less math you have the faster you can spin the motor that's just the way it is but uh yeah I think this is gonna be the best one this is going to be a short second to use I did need to make an adapter coupler for this one it works so I spun that up on the lathe also um made the one side of this smoother so that way I could put different weights and stuff on here if I wanted to add weight onto this flywheel Motors where'd my mortars go okay let's see how these perform actually oh roughly uh go ahead and put that on and these aren't going to be perfectly balanced I'll tell you right away in order to perfectly balance your flywheel it takes forever and this one needs a little bit more work because I've got the screw hole here I need to put another hole here on this side to make sure it's perfectly balanced but that's not important let's give it a quick spin see how balanced it is that's terrible let's even get a better balance real quick yeah kind of um let's go ahead and uh spin that up [Music] see how you perform [Music] yeah you got balance that's okay we'll spin it up anyway it'll balance itself out through the magic of inertia [Music] that's quite nice actually I have quite a bit of uh gyroscopic Force yeah that's that's a keeper [Music] no no we don't have to hyper Beyblades right now uh let's go ahead and test this out and get this balanced real quick [Music] hey good enough but not perfect but good enough for a test run [Music] oh yeah that's that's also fairly nice honestly I think this is the one that I'm most looking forward to using that's picking up significant speed definitely faster than the other one that is twerky but oh yeah it's still turkey both very good options both very good option and to answer the question about which uh is a better gyroscope weight I actually had really good luck with them you think I wouldn't there's only one downside because they're not perfectly round there's quite a bit of air Greg which makes it not the most ideal but as far as an easily accessible weight that you can put on something that's been around you have stepper Motors they work pretty well go ahead and finish this up real quick it's just on a little laptop floor fan where's this motor [Music] yeah not bad not the best but not bad these are great for little single lithium ion cell tiny pocket gyroscopes very similar though when I built with this but yeah so I think I'm gonna Mount these and balance them and we'll come back to building a frame and discussing options for that but so far we have quite a few ideas already on the table and we have some good progress before we get into design considerations for your DYI power gyroscope I want to show you a little trick when it comes to balancing your gyroscope and that is detecting vibrations of an unbalanced gyroscope will make vibrations so what you'll need is a fairly thin piece of material this is just a mirror and you want to suspend it on two sides so that way it's vibrate pretty freely yeah that should work and then it'll amplify the vibrations like a drum wood um anyway listen for that as I discussed design considerations so this is the first gyroscope that I made it's the dryer angle and all it has is five pieces of plastic so two triangles and three sides holds the battery all in nice and neat um what's interesting about this is it shows the gyroscope likes to remain in a fixed axis oh I'm gonna go ahead and turn it on and before it starts up if we give it a little hit oh gyroscope action is already enabled so a normal shape like this if you hit it fall over but you can actually hit this with significant force and it doesn't no it shows how a gyroscope likes to keep its orientation the downside about this design is the flywheel is really close to the plastic the plastic's not that strong so if I rock the gyroscope you can hear the flywheel rub up against the plastic so keep in mind spacing with flimsy materials go ahead and turn that off by the way listen to the vibration real quick don't make much noise oh take this put this off to the side let's take a look at this gyroscope right here so pretty similar Design This just uses two circular pieces of aluminum that I cut out I think they were laptop CD-ROM drives and I use four standoffs and eight screws for this not much to it very simple to build both these designs have sides that you can mount like a pin or a pivot on I'm gonna go ahead and turn this one on I'm gonna hear some of the same uh problems of the triangle here so if I rotate it real quickly not as bad a little bit more distance so I can get it to rub no doing pretty good actually put this on uh the plate he uh does some weird stuff gyroscopes do take a look listen to the vibration you can already tell the balance on that not as good here a little bit of rattle let's take a look at the last telescope that I built if I turn that one off which is the one I made using uh the fan casing and housing uh this is a nice design but it lacks another side so you're gonna have to find something to put on if you want to have a little pin like this sticking out of both sides let's go ahead and see how much vibration this design generates that's pretty quiet though it should also be quiet when we set it on the glass now this is a faster gyroscope so make a little bit more vibration but overall pretty quiet yeah that's excellently balanced that way so yeah these are all all good designs so I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a design similar to this instead of using four standoff I'm going to use only three this three is the minimum amount that we can have and have a stable surface and then I'll make probably a little section A little disc with three more standoffs or something that'll extend out this way um well what about if you don't have any kind of fancy materials well it's about as simple as you can make a gyroscope so it just adds a little DC motor in here this screw right here offers us a leverage point it can hang it on a string and on this side we have our balancing point this thing um let's see it's powered by a little lithium-ion cell simple switch not exactly balanced but it's simple it just uses a container lid for the outside and then two little caps and it works very nice looks very nice not balanced however how well does it work let's put it on the string and find out [Music] no this is a good reminder that uh just because you're using simple materials and everything is not exactly perfect you can still get excellent results but the DUI gyroscope a lot of simple things you can find around the house powered by bees angry bees yeah I don't care what it's made out of uh you know you want to play with this [Applause] God is so cool it really is just real cool uh move it around the same uh okay I'm gonna relax you look at that Works real well [Music] [Applause] this thing will go pretty much until the batteries were out so that's uh get into building uh our gyroscopes put that aside uh oh it's gonna be horrible settle down I'm gonna show you some orders that I have here so this is um one flywheel mounted and just about perfectly balanced so I'm going to show you that real quick it's full speed so 12 volts in we'll see how much vibration it makes [Music] all right you really hear the uh air coming off that thing that balance is so good go ahead and test the other one so I did not drill a hole here I actually used a screw and I cut the screw down to the exact length I needed it to match the weight over on this side of course because steel is heavier I did not need to fill up that hole as much but this also has a very good balance go ahead and spin this one up [Music] [Music] now it might not seem as balanced but keep in mind that gyroscope has a round bottom this one doesn't that's quite nice get a closer look on that huh yeah that's superb those are gonna make great gyroscopes all right so now that we got an idea of what design we want to use for our gyroscope frame which is going to be very similar to this except using three standoffs let's go ahead and start to design what the frame might look like and we're going to start off with the flywheel in the middle so let's go ahead and put that there that's our flywheel you will make sure that that's not obstructed and then I'm going to have two plates so one plate is going to go along the side like this and one plate is going to go along the side like this just like in this design I'm going to use three standoffs so let's say there's one that we can't see that's obstructed by the flywheel and then our other two standoffs are here now like that and then we're gonna have two more plates that we can mount our needlepoint or string hanging implementation on we got to keep in mind that we also have where the motor actually mounts so let's say we take a look at this our motor right here is probably going to mount in like this so that section and then we're going to probably Mount the battery uh pack on the other side like this a bit bigger than the motor mount and then yeah and then we can put our plates on there so let's do a plate about this same size right here let's do a plate of that same size right here and we'll do our standoff let's see one two three the battery pack you might need four to get around that we might need four because of this well you're gonna need four because the screw is fun yeah so let's consider maybe four standoffs and then we're gonna have our little end post sticking out like that so that's the plan let's talk about materials as I said earlier in the video with the dryer angle this is made out of a very thin plastic this is just the acrylic from a 2d ROM disc case so a jewel case everything plastic not very structural but with a small gyroscope like this works pretty well um and obviously aluminum is also an option um as I use it for the circular tires go you can also use thicker plastic like this however trying to use polycarb or something else don't use acrylic because acrylic especially when you machine it or whatnot likes to break and we're going to put forces on it like this so that's going to put additional stress and torque on those points where you put the standoffs and stuff in so acrylic is a good material it's not exactly the most structural or machinable material a great option is printed circuit board material though it is a composite material usually made out of fiberglass and an epoxy resin and it's pretty tough as little no flex so what I might do is I might use this for one of the gyroscopes it's very lightweight which is another feature when I keep the driversical frame as light as possible so I might use this I might look for cool circuit boards you see kind of take parts off doing the fine uh but the best of the best option I think we can put in our gyroscope is carbon fiber now this is a special piece of carbon fiber that's made for auto body work and what makes it special is that it has this layer on the inside and so it's mostly air pockets with a hexagonal um frame on the inside and that gives us a lot of rigidity because it's a carbon fiber layer mostly air layer and another carbon fiber layer on the bottom so it gives us tension and it is very strong stuff make a very strong stuff no it's definitely rigid you're not gonna snap that no I think I'm going to build a gyroscope using this stuff the downside to working with uh Composites like the carbon fiber or the PCB they cut very easy with a Dremel rotary tool but the downside is whatever you get on you like your skin or whatnot can be very irritating you got little carbon fiber needles coming off the material here same thing with the fiberglass so keep in mind that it might be irritating if you get it on your skin try and use the respirator it's nasty stuff to work with but yeah we have options so let's go ahead start getting parts and making circles as you can tell by the condition of the dry erase diagram it's been a busy desk and significant progress has been made so let me show you what I have Tada look at that perfect that's exactly what I was visioning in my mind when I was drawing the driver's diagram so it's made out of this printer circuit board and it's also made out of a couple of screws and a couple of brass inserts that have harvested from things over the ears made myself a little hanging Point here I can test it out this used to see 60 gram flywheel so how much this is weigh now let's see 178 grams so I've added about 120 grams of weight to this bugger oh and I still need to add more so it's going to wait on the three batteries about six grams a piece 18 grams for three batteries okay um so 18 plus about 200 grams plus a little bit more because I still need to add the wiring and I need to add the other end post with a point on it so it has all that's been worth it will adding this much weight on the gyroscope have an impact on its performance well if people work at all go ahead and find that out actually uh to do that I'm going to simulate the weight of the added things with this bearing 42 grams so giving us 220 ish grams in total for the light wheel and gyroscope assembly pull that off put that in there and you can see oh that lines up very well see I took my time with this lines up very well go ahead put that on I did fumble a hole pretend like you didn't notice all right so with that ball bearing in there simulating the additional weight of everything should be about 220 oh spot on look at that it's about um so yeah go ahead and uh spin this up with the voltage see if it'll even pick up grab a string here it's a pretty heavy gyroscope put that in there okay and we'll spin it up thank you I ain't even gonna kid you man every time I hear a gyroscope go that fast I get PTSD I know the power that's stored in that flywheel all right go ahead and lift it will it work oh look at that okay worked really well quite impressive [Music] oh yep looks like uh it'll function still obeys a lot of physics go ahead and uh get the batteries and stuff kind of situated in there and get this one built and then I'll go through a little bit more of the actual build process and other tips with the other gyroscope that I'm working on let's show you the progress made on that one uh gyroscope yep that one's made out of carbon fiber carbon fiber this stuff is about two-thirds the weight of the PCB so it's a much lighter material as I said step or two I've got this one mounted on there pretty nicely uh pretty nicely balanced so I gotta find standoff stuff to put this one together make two more carbon fiber discs once again in the same kind of General configuration just a little bit wider yeah coming together great so I'm gonna get this one all put together we'll play around with it a little bit and then we'll go over some practical build tips if you're going to build a gyroscope like this for yourself it's time to reveal a completed gyroscope ta-da it turned out beautifully so let's see what I've done I have my three lithium ion Polymer batteries right here switch here got my four connector charging terminal there and yeah everything looks fantastic let's go ahead turn it on Dust it out so what I'm going to do is I'm going to compare this one to the Cheapo put together a quick gyroscope here the mass on this one's about 200 grams math and this one's about 100 the flywheel weight about 50 so half the weight of this is the flywheel and this one has a 60 gram flywheel so about a third of the weight is flywheel Mass on this one so heavier frame in comparison to the flywheel and the better the flywheel works the slower the gyroscope will process so kind of want to get a rough idea how well this works now that's up to feet I'll let it go and we can see if it works and processes okay pretty good spinning a bit hot hopping too okay so you need some balancing um anyway let's see how fast it processes oh one two three four five uh between five and six okay thing is still quite visceral go ahead and spin this one up you see cheap periscope no better or worse I might be a little slower one two three four five no they're actually about the same speed so as far as gyroscopes go I work about the same actually there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between about an hour and a half and a cheap motor and unbalanced weight and about five six hours of work and a lot more time and Engineering going into it as far as demonstrations go uh this gyroscope obviously it looks better and doesn't sound like bees are you off are you on I can't even tell it this one I think it's off now anyway so yeah we have one more gyroscope to build and a lot of you like to see things being put together so that's what I'm gonna do now we're gonna go through real engineering with this and now finish this gyroscope off at this point I have two more pieces of carbon fiber to start manufacturing uh Machining processes on I've already got a rough circle cut out here and I've got the center point mark so we're gonna go ahead take these on the drill press drill the hole inside clamp them together put them on the lathe spin them so they're nice and round and then start to mark off where the screws and everything need to go for these screws and stand off everything else so yeah let's get the hands dirty let's get the Machining let's start drilling I want to do that turn on the drill press here we go uh we're gonna drill those Center holes out right neat airblade and this stuff cut like butter I think we can make that work let's go ahead and not these on the lead all right now I have the two pieces of carbon fiber mounted on the lathe and we're going to spin them down to perfect discs now even though this carbon fiber has a high tensile strength it's hard to bend it's compression uh capabilities aren't that great it has that mostly air core so I have this and another piece in the back to evenly support the compressive forces of the screw and I'm using to hold it into the Chuck a little bit more let's go ahead spin it up and uh make some circles and that looks pretty good so I'm not going to do I'm going to file over the outside here you got these little carbon fiber uh bristle sticking off the side of the discs go ahead and knock those off real quick yeah that looks good all right let's take these off please and see how they look looks pretty good to me I think those would do just fine oh yeah all right I have two discs look at that nice and shiny assuming you already have discs and you want to put some holes in there so you put them all together we're going to talk about figuring out where to put holes so if you have two larger discs you don't want to put three holes in there to hold those together but you also got to put four holes in each of these discs to clamp those together oh where are you gonna put them how do you figure this out you do a whole bunch of math and whatnot but there are easier ways to do it well let's talk about that now I find putting four holes in something like this to be actually pretty easy it's just a simple tool all you need is pretty much caliper and some kind of stencil or whatnot use as a reference so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna make a circle on there the like this and then carefully scribe in there like that route pretty simple to do uh you don't have the calipers you can uh figure out something creative but you know two points should be all too difficult so now we're going to put four holes well I'll grab a stencil like this and I'm gonna kind of Center it up on there is that as much as I can that look Center yeah that's pretty close okay now holding that down I'm gonna go ahead and mark it like so there just like that and if you're wondering how I did the the three holes just use essential like this works really well plus a lot of these will give you good Center but what about if you don't have a center that's easy to get to so for example you can't really put a calipers or anything else in there but you can also measure from the outside figure out where you need to put your marks so let's show you how to do that and you just go along the outside and uh subscribe like this oops you go all the way around and you'll get some nice good marks like that so very easy to kind of Mark out where you want your holes to go keep everything nice and thinner regardless of which way you tackle it let's go ahead and do that now um this disc here you're gonna need something about the same size so go ahead do that now of course we're going to go a little deeper so bring it like that see where that gets us bringing it a little bit more very careful that I don't lock up the carbon fiber all too much uh-huh right and then stencil now this is actually the side that the batteries are gonna go in so you got to keep that in mind oh that's one of the posts so the batteries are gonna come in this way it's going to be laid down flat like that so go ahead and line that up like that actually all right so now I gotta go ahead and cut all four of those holes out very carefully can't be as crazy as I could with the Center hole for the smaller discs everything needs to light up pretty well so I'll go ahead and do that and then we'll hopefully be able to put everything together at this point all the Machining I need to do for the gyroscope is done so we can start assembling the whole thing now I want to go over real quick what I've done already I've already attached this bottom plate to the plate that holds the brushless motor with the four standoff eight screws I also epoxied the screws that hold that plate on on this side by the flywheel that way I can take this piece off and service it I do the same with this side here just because I don't want the screws to get loose especially because they're inside not the easiest to access well uh this goes on uh pretty nicely I have my keys here there we go oh I think it was on like sure and then I have this piece right here where's my key tolerances you know uh that'll go on like this and uh so what we need to do now is uh install the batteries and the electronicals oh before that I just want to let you know if you can't find standoffs like this you can always use screws like I've done here with nuts or you know harvested things or you can use these little standoff posts that you can pull from uh the connectors on laptops video cards and stuff well there's uh a lot of options there so anyway let's go over the basic wiring that I'm going to use uh three batteries again because it's a 12 volt Motors and each battery gives me about four volts when it's fully charged up let's go ahead and drop our batteries out here now One battery two battery and we're gonna put uh negative on this side I'm gonna go ahead and draw positive on that side and I'm going to be wiring these batteries up in series so that means that each battery that provides four volts so we'll write a four on here we're going to join them together in a link so I'm going to take the negative from one side and draw it over like this and same thing for this one and then if you measure between the two outsides you'll get 12 volts go ahead and draw able output so that's one side that's the other side here uh and then we got to do something with the power so let's go ahead draw the motor and then we're gonna have a connection here and we can just take the connection from the negative side of the motor just join it directly like that choose a battery but on the positive side we gotta put a switch in so I'm going to take that side bring it on down like that go like this and we're going to draw a little contact like that and that's going to be our switch now we also need to be able to charge the batteries so how do we do that well I use a four pin connector and many uh three Cell lithium ion Polymer batteries use the same thing so let's go ahead and draw our connector here so just like that and then we're going to draw four pins so what I'm doing is I'm connecting them up like they usually do we're going to start with say the negative side here we're going to connect the negative uh side that first pin like that and then these two links we're going to connect to the two inner ones just like this and then we're going to have one more that goes from the positive side to that last link and so that gives us our tap so we can use for charger and each one of these Taps will be the same is on the batteries so for example this one will be um positive on the outside it'll be a negative we can write this as our zero volt right that one as our 12 and then from there we will have or eight volts well uh between each one of these you have a positive and a negative so you can either use a three cell charger or you can use two of the any of the pins to charge your batteries individually which is uh what I'm doing in this case so for example if I want to charge this battery I plug it into these two I might have I want to charge this battery plug it into these two and so on and so forth and uh that's how that works so this is the schematic that way I'm going to wire it up and that's what I did with uh this one right here so very easy now let's go ahead and start with the electronics all right you're ready to finish up a gyroscope I am let's go ahead and do that I have my battery pack all put together if you're installing batteries like this I recommend that you use some masking tape so that way if you glue them in you can also remove them don't directly glue down the batteries uh you don't have to use batteries exactly like this in fact you can use several different types of batteries so for example I probably use batteries like this and it would accomplish the exact same task just to make sure that they're relatively balanced you could also probably stack multiple cells that are thin on top of one another as long as you got the wiring correct you'll be good well I have my plug for charging my three batteries and my switch everything's in there and the switch isn't epoxied and still works so it looks all ready to go so I'm gonna go ahead and start making my connections on this side I'm going to do the the two battery terminals in the middle and that way I can bring the motor wire and the negative together and then I'm also going to do the one for the positive because this is going to get connected to the switch and then from the other side of the switch out to the motor positive wire so let's go ahead and do that zoom in that way you can see what I'm doing put this down all nice and neat there you go and let's get soldering no after this is done uh we can go ahead and do some gyroscope experiments honestly I don't know that much about gyroscope so I could be completely wrong about that whole uh procession thing being slower if the more effective gyroscope pretty sure it has to do with you know how far out from the center of axis the point of leverages on the gyroscope all sorts of other things but uh we can go ahead and check out some of the differences between the gyroscopes compare them once they're all done and put together they are also and then they make these things capable of being mountable on different things oh for example I'll show you that real quick I'm leaving some screw threads on the end so that way I can screw them into things in mind them that way right there well I remember if you're not familiar with using lithium ion polymers or you don't have a proper battery charger and are just using what you can find um watch for the protected lithium ion cell so have a little circuit board right here but yeah um these can be a massive fire hazard so if you're inexperienced try and use protected cells not unprotected ones like I'm using all right so that's done now I can take this and put it on top of the gyroscoping connect the motor up the negative side comes through these side comes through these right here now I'm going to make another recommendation here you have the longer wires you have the urge to make the wires shorter so they can go cleanly so where they need to go like this but you don't want to do that in this case because if you do then you can't pull this apart because you don't have the wire slack so keep a fair bit of length in the layer so that way you can lift this up and open the gyroscope if you need to do some maintenance on it or balancing or whatnot so I'm gonna go ahead and probably leave what's on there cut maybe a half an inch off on that side and then move that around yeah go ahead and cut what inch off that end now I gotta connect this wire and this wire to the negative battery terminal right there ing is much more difficult when you have a camera or you need to be right that looks pretty good come over here and connect this side up now and off the switch back in a little Bend right no it should be good to go ahead and flip a switch and see if we get power there it goes yeah all right cool cool so what I'm going to do now I'm going to do a little wire management on the path because if this thing starts spinning around it's going to want to fling the wires out due to the I think what centrifugal force centrifugal force it's one of those I'm not a gyroscope expert but before I do all that what I should do is put hot glue down in the battery tab so they don't touch either precautions precautions precautions thumbs up if you can smell this video all right and now one last piece just to help hold everything together a little bit more it's a piece of foam and then when the uh hop gets put on the top will hold that together add some compression force to the wires and tape and then it gives a little bit more stability no what side do I want I think that's the side I want to go go ahead and screw this together do that and fast speed up video form all right that's it no it's not those are gonna help oh I bet that was painful because I have a few to watch there now now it's actually done so let's go ahead and try it out I don't know how charged it is but that spin and I dress that it does Spin and ain't gonna spin there it goes it's got to be the motor soft spot now start remember when I said earlier in the video that some Motors don't like to start up when they have a lot of mass that's exactly what I mean some Motors don't like to start up when they have a lot of mass okay here's a mask how much does this bugger weigh it's fairly balanced so uh the fact that spinning shouldn't really change anything on the scale back to trying to roll away definitely does we'll check the weight later we'll see how it spins now all right this seems a little heavier I have my doubts to be honest okay you know what I shouldn't have my doubts that thing is quite heavy I'm one of these about one third ish heavier than the other one but the balance on it is much better it's almost astonishing go ahead and turn that off but it's been gone we will check the balance on it real quick that gorgeous you couldn't get better accidentally I can still get it a little bit better by uh putting some weights and whatnot on it but anyway uh what is the weight 255 grams okay so this weighs 50 grams heavier than the other one uh let's see uh 80 gram flywheel versus the 60 gram ish flywheel about 55 grams actually so 25 grams uh more in the flywheel 25 grams more in the frame at the rough size comparison I'm gonna go charge this up think of uh some creative gyroscope experiments we can do and we're gonna come back and do them also discuss a little bit more about some design considerations that I've learned making these some other tips that I can hopefully pass along to you so that way you can make your own DYI gyroscope a little easier for my first gyroscope experiment I want to see if you can stack for assessing gyroscopes or hang them kind of like a mobile so what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if I can put this gyroscope on here and then maybe hook this gyroscope on the end uh physics says it's possible so we're going to go ahead and try that out whether I have enough power in the gyroscopes to do that there's a whole nother thing so I'm gonna go ahead and start the gyroscopes up take a little while to spin up uh yeah okay we're gonna set that one on there like this yeah that seems to work now we're going to put another string on the other end of that gyroscope then like that and uh I'm gonna hang this on the hook of the loop that one so I got two gyroscopes now and I got a foam uh mat because I don't know if you're gonna really stay up or whatnot probably should give it a little bit more of an angle just to give it the best of luck here in three two one wow that works I had not expect that to work honestly but uh there it goes I think it's that gyroscope that's neat oh that's unexpected actually [Music] right uh Under the Electric scope test this one obviously passes now that I have seen two gyroscopes linked together in processing of course you gotta try screen now I do have my genuine doubts about this actually working but we're gonna go ahead and give it a try anyway I'm gonna link these two gyroscopes together [Music] and see if uh these even work for that one for assessing uh let's see if I can drop this one and if it still works my entry there's about now 500 grams on there I I think it's going to come cracking down honestly oh yeah it really is there's not enough power in that gyroscope to hold it in place earlier in the video I also discussed that I want to be able to mount the gyroscope to things but it also allows us to study the gyroscope in other ways like for example what changes on the gyroscope happen if you move the point where you hang it out further well let's go ahead and find out oh we'll move it out about that far away actually we're going to keep it here and uh we're gonna see how it processes close to the gyro go ahead and speed it up I'm gonna let it go and we're gonna see how it works okay so my guess is that if we move it out further probably not going to work as well ah yes masking tape it sticks to itself and nothing else uh let's move it out about that part see what changes we get on the jaroscope [Music] hmm not much honestly go ahead and move it out even further I think it's gonna start to Sag pretty badly out this far away from the flywheel the only way to tell is that it happened [Music] looks to be processing a little faster all right so that means that we add more probably get even faster procession now of course it's thinner isn't actually true because the chain moves as well it's not a fixed point but [Music] put that on there remove this out I hope they made those bearings on a on a Wednesday all right see what happens now I think it's gonna go even faster if it doesn't just fall over right away all right that's foundable all right let's uh put some math on that side let's see what happens and we're not learning all too much are we go ahead and put a mass on the other side see what we get can we balance this out so it's not processing completely I think we can [Music] so that seems to be the heavier side about there yeah okay [Music] all right so that's about perfect so if I sets a little bit of math on there on this side will it start processing by now it should not very fast add some more math on that though looks like it wants to go clockwise they're good slow down if I picked this up that we're gonna stop right away interesting coming back probably just upset the balance a little bit let's stop that's interesting okay so let's drive something now let's stop processing we're gonna put another weight on there we're gonna see if it does a full rotation ah sounds difficult [Music] see if it does a full rotation we're gonna tape that on there and see if it does a full rotation [Music] and then what I'm going to do is I'm not going to stop the gyroscope but I am going to remove the weight I want to see if it comes back and stops where it was before or it falls to Pieces please hold for having technical difficulties the technical difficulties have been solved and I got the gyroscope now balanced with my uh counterweight on the other side we're gonna go ahead and continue with that experiment so I'm going to go ahead I'm gonna put the weight on the gyroscope we're gonna see what happens and it processes counterclockwise see about one and a half rotations and I'm Gonna Take It Off that processes clockwise not as much but here's the question why is it that when I put the weight on it like this why doesn't it continue to process why is it at one point it stops processing you know what I mean why did it continue to spin around well let me explain what's going on a little bit oh to do that I'm gonna actually stop the gyroscope and I'm going to rebalance it now we got to consider that the gyroscope will only process when there is a force applied um on the axis so up and down like this um when there isn't a force it won't process so what's going on is the additional Force when I put the weight on it will want to cause the gyroscope to go down a procession will kick in I will make it process one way until it finds its balance point now once it's balanced there's no more torque applied to the gyroscope and no reason for it to process anymore however when I take the weight off well now we have a torque applied to the gyroscope and that torque comes from the weight wanting to pull it down or in this case push the gyroscope upwards which is in opposite torque so now we have a torque that'll move us the other way would be equal clockwise uh back to where it was so that's what's going on now the interesting thing about procession versus uh gravity is gravity is a an acceleration for us uh that's a constant force of what uh I think 9.86 meters per second per second so that means for every second that you fall you gain an additional 9.8 meters per second however we don't have a constant acceleration force that can be easily seen with the gyroscopes I'm gonna go ahead and put this gyroscope on there now you'll notice that the procession is pretty much constant so it doesn't get faster and faster and faster and faster so why is it that this stays at the same relative velocity as it goes around in circles and it doesn't gain any velocity it doesn't have any acceleration to it well that's an interesting question and I think that what we're looking at is that same constant force giving it a constant torque going around now because it's a constant force you're not going to go any faster but we do have losses and whatnot it's weird conservation of angular momentum stuff not a gyroscope expert but it's just interesting to note the difference between gyroscopic recession and the acceleration force with gravity um when we're at it let's see also if the flywheel speed does actually change the procession speed which I think it does I'm going to go ahead and let this go yeah that's pretty slow uh I'm gonna wait till this kind of slows down add friction all right it's it's significantly slower but will it be faster as it processes I think it will be a little quicker I think wait till it slows down quite a bit I'm rocking it because it adds additional force on the bearings okay now it's pretty slow bullet process even quicker oh yeah So the faster the flywheel is going the slower it will process just like as I thought in the video anyway the last thing I'm going to do is wrap up with a couple more tips and go over why I didn't use any of the three-phase motors and that's it the video will be long enough and done so what did we learn about gyroscopes in this video well I learned that these little three-phase CD-ROM Motors are still a terrible option to use for a DUI gyroscope not only do they need a fancy three-phase uh controller ESC but they also suffer from a structural problem that I discussed earlier and that has to do with the way that the rotor assembly is constructed so much like this one if there's any kind of side torquing it'll get loose and simply lose its structural Integrity so similar thing happened when I tried to pull the plastic CD-ROM clamping mechanism off the top of this one you can see that that pin that shaft is really loose in there now has no structural support so that's what I mean by you know how they get loose and kind of Fall Apart let's talk about gyroscope optimization real quick the first thing to optimize is not only your motor wattage performance but to make sure that your flywheel doesn't have too much mass to overload your bearings and wear those out ball bearings once again are the best uh the more you can reduce the vibration on your flywheel the easier it will be on the bearings too because they don't have to deal with the constant shaking force in order to find your flywheel balance point and get that correct you can either uh try to work real hard and Center it like I did or you can add subtract math as needed to find out where to put your weight or remove your weight you can always use like clay or plastic something like Wax you can put on there temporarily just kind of get a feel for where you need to add that mass same thing applies for the frame of the gyroscope if you want to get that a little bit better another thing to note is you probably want to make the frame of your gyroscope as light as you possibly can now that does have its down you know downfalls especially with the power gyroscope because you got to deal with the torquing uh the torquing force of the motor so kind of like a helicopter the gyroscope gets pushed one way the flywheel gets pushed one way the case gets pushed the other way so having too little weight I'll also make the frame of the gyroscope the case has been quicker so there's upsides and downsides you also probably want to try to optimize how close your hanging point or your balancing point is to the flywheel that'll help with balance as well as trying to balance out the frame itself but yeah other than that you know you can see that there's options you know you can build your own gyroscope you know there's options engineering is about overcoming the deficits that we have that's why necessity is the mother of invention Innovation sorry imagination might be the father of innovation but necessity is a mother of invention so this is better than no gyroscope keep that in mind I'm gonna wrap up the video now with my final test and that involved using the larger gyroscope that I put together so just like early in the video I had two gyroscopes in a row linked and processing I want to see if this third gyroscope can support two more gyroscopes just like you can support this channel by the link below it keeps the sponsor segments free and limits the ads that I put on so it's a win-win but we're gonna try and hang three gyroscopes together see if they process I think if that happens it'll be a real cool way to end this video there are many industries that use Flywheels for various applications such as in the Aeronautics industry where fly wheels are used for the Artificial Horizon and aircraft they use them for reaction wheels and robots for making the move and hold position satellites use them in similar Fashions as well so hold a particular axis and they're even used for storing large amounts of energy that there have been even vehicles that are powered by stored energy in flywheels but I'm going to use them to show you my poor self-preservation Instinct so let's go ahead and start spinning up some gyroscopes to see if it can hang free processing gyroscopes in a row oh I spin up this gyroscope here the big one I'm going to take a couple of uh a couple of seconds it is a large gyroscope we're going to start these periscopes up here uh let's see if we can pull the rabbit out of the Hat so warm warm warm warm warm here we can switch these to the battery real quick faster faster faster this is not what I want to be doing but 15 in the name of science all right so we have that gyroscope going we're gonna hang it up it should process rather nicely hopefully everything stays where it should be yes it does okay we're gonna set the other flywheels up or other gyroscopes up now and then this is pick that one up all right can we do three will this be a huge mistake this is why I have padding underneath one two three look at that three processing gyroscopes at once [Music] and that's the kind of entertainment you get I feel really bad with that being said as always thanks for watching and stay tuned for more [Music]

Channel: Zenodilodon

Views: 8,553

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Id: ocjdIMmuOY4

Length: 95min 55sec (5755 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 20 2023