Homemade GENERATOR GEARBOX | power almost any usb device.

this gearbox can power almost any usb device while it may look simple there are actually many engineering challenges that had to be tackled in order to make it work so today we're going to see what it takes to design and 3d print a homemade generator what will it be able to power can it charge an iphone you may have already seen my other gearbox videos where i try to see how fast i can get a 3d printed gearbox to spin my current record is about 9000 rpms and that's with the drill attachment i received tons of great feedback and suggestions and i've implemented most of them into this new design the first major improvement is using herringbone gears instead of spur gears the gears can handle a lot more torque they self-align and they're much quieter i also optimized the tooth size for the amount of torque that each gear is subjected to the gears closer to the handle or input are extra strong and have a large teeth i printed them with petg because it's stronger than pla the first two gears have the largest teeth and as you progress to the next gears the teeth get smaller and smaller let's take a look at why this is you could almost think of a gear as a lever or a teeter-totter on the playground if the pivot point is perfectly positioned in the center then the force on either side has to be the same for the system to be in equilibrium but what if we move the pivot point over you'll need more force on one side for it to be in equilibrium this is kind of like how the gearbox works i could take a light weight and put it on this side that has the longer lever arm and i could take a much heavier weight and put it on the side with the shorter lever arm it's kind of like having the big heavy kid on one side of the teeter-totter and the small lighter kid on the other side of the teeter-totter here's the diagram again so the small gear is kind of like the small side of the teeter-totter and the large gear is like the bigger side of the teeter-totter if you add more gears it's kind of like multiplying the teeter-totter effect i could hang a really heavy weight on one side and a very light weight on the other side so the teeth on the right side have to be much stronger because they have to be able to handle a lot more force compared to the gear on the left side the teeth could be much smaller because the force is much lighter now that we understand how the forces work in the system what is the speed relationship between the different gears these two gears have a three to one gear ratio that means the gear on the right has three times as many teeth as the small gear on the left if i draw a line on the same spot of both gears and i rotate the gear you can see the small gear has to rotate three times before it comes back into alignment with the gear on the right if i add another gear to the system we essentially have two three to one gear ratios so we have three to one and then three two one again so all you have to do is three times three and you get a nine to one ratio so the gear on the left has to spin nine times in order for it to align again with the gear on the right so basically all of that just to say that we want the last gear to spin really fast when we spin the handle and with the increase of speed torque decreases another thing you might have noticed is i added a belt to the system the belt is made out of tpu and it was actually pretty easy to make and now it's not really necessary for the system but i thought it'd be a cool thing to add the belt powers the flywheel which is attached to the axle of the three-phase electric motor to add weight to the flywheel i used nuts and bolts [Music] let's take a look at some of the other improvements for the design i added mounting holes so you can mount it to a tabletop or workbench also the generator slash flywheel module just bolts right onto the main gearbox body the handle also has a cap that bolts it into place there's also a built-in adapter hole for drill the handle and drive gear are significantly stronger the flywheel is also on a slot which allows you to tension the belt i also added a handle that attaches right to the top that way it's easy to hold the gearbox down if you don't want to clamp it or mount it to your desk [Music] the gearbox is cool and all but we want some power [Music] so [Music] so how do we actually convert the rotation of the flywheel into electricity to do this i'm utilizing a three-phase ac generator and i'll show you what that means inside the generator you have the stator and the stator holds copper coils there are three pairs of copper coils and they are opposite of each other these are connected together with a loop of wire if we rotate a magnet inside the stator the magnetic field disturbs the free electrons in the copper wire this creates a sinusoidal electric current basically the voltage alternates between negative and positive that's why it's called alternating current because we have three pairs and each one of these pairs is slightly offset this will give us three different sine waves that are slightly offset from each other there's one problem though we want to power usb devices but usb devices require 5.1 volts of direct current or dc right now we have three phases of ac power at varying voltages i'm not going to go into complete detail about how the circuit works but as you can see on the left we have three sources of ac power and these are slightly out of phase with each other the triangle symbols with the lines are diodes and basically the circuit uses six diodes to chop up the sine waves and flip them around to make basically a steady direct current if we put a capacitor into the circuit we could smooth out the voltage here you can see the six diodes and the one capacitor this circuit's called a three phase full wave rectifier the second part of the circuit utilizes an integrated circuit voltage regulator and two capacitors and the last thing i have to do is just plug in the positive and negative sides of my usb port to the regulated voltage and with that let's plug in the three wires to our circuit and see what we could power so the first thing we'll test is a marble machine that i created and this marble machine is called light speed it's called light speed because it has a magnetic marble launching system that i created and it is powered by a six volt dc motor so i'm going to plug the generator in directly in to light speed and we'll see how it does so as you can see it has no issue running this marble machine the voltmeter does say 4.9 volts though so here's the next challenge can it run two marble machines at the same time so it looks like it has no issue at all running both marble machines but we still have the big challenge can it charge an iphone so i found out when i was doing some research for this project that the tricky thing with an iphone is not only do you have to power the positive and negative wires for the usb port but you also have to bias the data lines with two volts and this wasn't that hard to do i just had to use two resistors to drop the voltage but i still couldn't get it to work and i'm not quite sure why maybe it's because i have 4.9 volts or it's because my current isn't high enough and when i measure the current i only got about 200 milliamps and an iphone needs i think at least 500 milliamps to charge however i found a way around this i could actually use my wireless charger to charge the iphone with my generator [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] i definitely think i'm underpowering the wireless charger because it does cut out every once in a while this generator is definitely not the most efficient generator in the world and it's definitely not that practical but this sure was a fun project to work on i hope you enjoyed this video take care and happy printing [Music] you

Channel: 3D Printer Academy

Views: 1,508,710

Rating: 4.8896151 out of 5

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d prints, 3d printed, gearbox, gear ratio, homemade, generator, electricity, power, diy, 3d print gear box, 3d printer academy, how to 3d print, ender 3 pro, fusion 360, full wave rectifier, ac generator, ac power, diodes, electronics, tech

Id: 72Q4g3V8woc

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/supercuck1234567890]

This video is real lmao. This is not free energy, he is basically using a dynamo to rotate an electric motor, creating energy. His kinetic energy is turning into electrical energy.

[u/K3CAN]

Appears to be a generator...

[u/supercuck1234567890]

Wait can anyone tell me why using gears to increase the speed cant make more energy than what is being put in?