LED Cyr Wheel v1 Problems

Circus/Cyr Wheel

Some of the problems with my original LED cyr wheel:

1. LEDs are dying, from me stepping on them. I took one of the bad sections apart, and it seems to be because some solder connections break (such as for the resistor). I can solder them back together, but it is not worth the time to reskin/glue it. I need to figure out a better way to protect them.

Here you can see a resistor that fell off when I removed the protective skin. I think some hard epoxy on plain bare LED strips might “cement” them in place really well. Or some flexible silicon glue.

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The strip above lost the ability to do blue on the 3 set of LEDs. The single color strips are pretty durable..but I’ve broken *a lot* of them this way:

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2. Gluing the PVC on doesn’t work so well. The PVC doesn’t feel perfectly round in your hand, and it is harder to slip through.

3. The Arduino “reboots” if I hit the wheel hard. I finally figured out what causes this. My battery pack is made up of 8 rechargeable AA’s connected in series to give 9.6v (1.2v for a NiMH cell times 8). If I jerk the pack hard the spring compresses in the holder and breaks the connection on a cell, causing the Arduino to loose power. A capacitor might smooth this problem out, but the real solution is going to be a different battery pack that is permanently put together (i.e.: LiPo). I found some cells on Hobby King that should hopefully work, be more powerful, and lighter!

IMG_0606.JPG

4. The Arduino takes a long time to boot. I just need to remove the boot loader, which waits a bit before starting the Sketch/Program. I ordered a hardware programmer to do this.

5. The interconnects between wheels suck. Yeah, I couldn’t find any locally when I made the wheel. I ordered some better ones from Mouser yesterday.

6. The cyr wheel inserts are tapped wrong; I tapped them sort of inline with the center of the wheel…which is where I want the LEDs! The next wheel I do I’m going to tap them completely on the side of the wheel (and not on the inside diameter where I stand).

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