want to build spinning led light ball

Cool idea. Mine would need pre-programmed lines:

Don

well, I want one, or maybe two for the top of a building parapet. I want the base to sit on top of the wall. I need to measure it but I think the wall is 9 inches wide. I think the motor base would have to fit in a 9" X 9" up to 12" box , I think the ball could be 18" in diameter. I've just started looking at leds and for some kind of globe thing or someone to vacuum form it. I don't need anything fancy like signs or animation, just want a big toy.

what kind of beer?

I looked at a couple of old posts. They had similar ideas but they were all lights on flat bars and focused on signs such as you sugessted and animations. I want something dumber. I'm just interested in the light patterns and colors and the globe idea.

I took one apart. It has two curved arms, a shorter one for the southern hemisphere and longer one for the northern hemisphere. There are 5 leds, red, blue, green, white, yellow on each arm 180 degrees across from each other. I would, of course use some big leds. Big, some description- ha - shows I'm not an engineer but larger so they'd be in scale with the size. I think 18" in diameter is what I'm looking for. The circuit is printed on the arms and lead to a mystery chip, The arms are connected to a tube connected to a motor shaft. I don't know enough about electronics to figure this out but I feel pretty sure I could cookbook it if someone gave me the directions.

If all you want is constant-on LEDs, then the electronics are trivial. The hard part will be the mechanical part. Do you plan to use slip rings, or spinning batteries? Or something exotic, like inductive coupling, or turn your spinner into a generator armature with a few supermagnets?

But once you get a transparent 18" globe, and build some kind of spinner with LEDs on it, there's not much else to it. :-)

Now let the holy war - "Slip rings!" "Inductive coupling!" - begin! ;-P

Good Luck! Rich

I saw a diy one recently, that did not use sliprings, but soldered 3 (carefully) wires to the commutator of a dc motor, and used a 3 phase rectifier to get power to the rotation doobree. Sorry, lost the url, I cleaned out my cache, just before seeing your message

Probably Digg/boingboing or one of the Howto sites

martin

well I want a pattern. not just lights on. This toy has 68 patterns. The number of patterns doesn't matter. I just want some patterns that change randomly.

well here's one version.

and here's another

here's something for our party boy

I found this commercial ball

here's a cadillac version

and for the really ambitious - 3D TV.

For $700 it might be worth it for me to just buy this iball+ rather than make my own.