A clever “perpetual motion” device [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_LG8FDt51U

by _cnhi • 3 years ago

227 122 3 years ago

pxndx• 3 years ago

Lost it at the "through the magic of buying two of them" bit!

debesyla• 3 years ago

That, by the way, is a reference to another great channel - Technology Connections: https://youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections

dageshi• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs-YcmxyUw

Try1275• 3 years ago

The video is worth just for his expression at 1:07. Highly recommended. Have no interest in the topic and watched the whole thing!

iamjackg• 3 years ago

For those who don't know, it's a reference to Technology Connections[0], another incredible YouTube channel. Alec, the host, is very fond of that bit[1].

[0] https://youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZs-YcmxyUw

ChrisClark• 3 years ago

Hah yeah, for some reason that line never gets old for me.

russdill• 3 years ago

Oh my gosh, the green screen

em-bee• 3 years ago

i have only seen a few of alec's videos, but i immediately recognized this as familiar, wondering "hey, that's a different guy"

comicjk• 3 years ago

Was anyone else hoping it would detect the ball by simply completing a circuit (since the rails are metal and so is the ball)? Then it could give a magnetic tug after an appropriate time. Maybe this would be flaky because of the poor contact between rails and a rolling ball, but an inductive proximity sensor feels like overkill.

angry_moose• 3 years ago

It probably wouldn't work nearly as well.

It looks like the rails are already a complete circuit - I think they're a single piece of wire that is bent at the end to make a loop, and there are a couple lateral braces soldered on to keep them properly spaced.

You'd have to split the rails into two pieces and replace the lateral braces with something nonconductive (plastic) which wouldn't look nearly as nice; and the device would be a lot more prone to going out of calibration if the spacing drifted.

Its probably possible but there's a lot of downsides to save $2 on a sensor, some of which will be eaten up elsewhere as it will add some additional parts.

Edit: It would also somewhat spoil the magic, as that's the first thing most of us would think of (I certainly did).

ASalazarMX• 3 years ago

I was thinking a pair of tiny contacts could touch the ball and complete the circuit, but you're right, this isn't an engineering opportunity, but a performance issue. You shouldn't expose electricical components in a perpetual motion simulator.

djmips5• 3 years ago

Yes flaky, it's going to corrode and get dirty so the connections won't be reliable

yantrams• 3 years ago

Brings back childhood memories. Enjoyed reading about these and the accompanying illustrations as a kid from the excellent book Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman. Nirantara Chalana Yantralu they were called in Telugu translation.

facu17y• 3 years ago

I had the Arabic translated edition of that book! same fond memories!

tantony• 3 years ago

Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Perelman

I read the same in Malayalam! That book was one of my earliest introductions to practical physics. He deconstructs pretty much all the early "perpetual machine" designs in the book.

I also particularly remember the chapter with the experiments with soap bubbles as being very interesting as a kid.

mdp2021• 3 years ago

Thank you for the suggestion!

Yakov Perelman - Physics for Entertainment - https://archive.org/details/PhysicsForEntertainment-Eng-Yako...

I see that Astronomy for Entertainment, Algebra for Entertainment, Figures for Entertainment also exist.

maerF0x0• 3 years ago

Could this work as a magnetic rail with earth magnets? Would that not require any batteries then?

ugh123• 3 years ago

How would you "switch off" the magnets as the train approaches so as to allow it to pass with its newly gotten energy?

gus_massa• 3 years ago

I'm not sure if the GP is proposing a railgun. In any case, I propose a railgun version. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railgun

p1mrx3• 3 years ago

What do you propose to use as an energy source?

stavros• 3 years ago

Ooh, I'd love to find one of these on Ali, but their search is betraying me currently.

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

Excellent presentation, no dumb graphics, witticism, silly voices or stupid faces pulled etc, just nice clean explanation.

Nice toy too. I'd get one but I'd turn it on 3 times then get bored and give it away.

zht• 3 years ago

it's funny because there's another comment saying they really enjoy the stupid face at 1:07

ozay• 3 years ago

That's him imitating another YouTuber who does this stupid face all the time.

Cthulhu_4• 3 years ago

I like it as a desk toy, like the row of balls or things like that.

oldandtired5• 3 years ago

Steve makes an interesting statement when he says "we know that perpetual motion is not possible". Yet we have a modification to the general cosmological view with the theoretical entity "dark energy" which if you consider what is said about it properties, it provides a means of creating a "perpetual motion" environment.

So what can we say: Does perpetual motion exist or not?

dist-epoch2• 3 years ago

You are being pedantic.

If you want to consider dark energy perpetual motion, sure, but then it's excluded from the "we know that perpetual motion is not possible" rule.

"we know that perpetual motion is not possible" is based on the fact that you can't break the laws of physics, which perpetual motion is doing, but if dark energy is part of physics, it can't break those laws by definition.

oldandtired5• 3 years ago

When you say

If you want to consider dark energy perpetual motion, sure, but then it's excluded from the "we know that perpetual motion is not possible" rule.

That's the incongruity here. You can hedge it around in various ways, but it is still an incongruity, which was my point. I personally do not believe in any perpetual motion mechanism and I find the "dark energy" concept to be in that same set of mechanisms.

I somehow think that we will see soon enough a new set of theories and models that have a better explanatory power that what we see being expressed today in cosmology. How long? Don't know. But I suspect it won't be too far away. I think the same thing will happen in regards to the Standard Model.

What the fun will be is seeing what comes up. Hopefully people will be able to laugh at themselves when it arrives - though I don't think that this will happen. Too many people take themselves too seriously over these kinds of matters instead of dealing with the matters that really matter.

mr_mitm2• 3 years ago

Energy is not globally conserved in an expanding universe, dark energy existing or not.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-...

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/259759/conservat...

https://twitter.com/WKCosmo/status/1303134701180325890?t=pv5...

Obviously the guy in the video was making the implicit assumption that we are talking about local experiments.

n2d4• 3 years ago

The accepted solution in the second link claims your other two links are wrong:

Some people claim incorrectly that energy is not conserved in an expanding universe because space-time is not static. The law of Energy conservation is derived from Noether's theorem when the dynamical equations are unchanged with time. These people confuse the invariance of the equations with the invariance of the solution. Space-time changes but the equations obeyed by the expanding universe do not change. Space-time cannot be treated as a background, its dynamics must be included when deriving the enrgy equations via Noether's theorem. This leads to the equations given above which show that energy is indeed conserved.

oldandtired5• 3 years ago

You say

Obviously the guy in the video was making the implicit assumption that we are talking about local experiments.

And yet this is not discussed by Steve. And that "obviousness" and "implicitness" is your particular take.

I like Steve. I think he has an approach that is both entertaining and educational. But like all educators, he can miss certain things. Unlike certain other science educators though, he does a far better job of providing explanation.

Cthulhu_4• 3 years ago

What makes you think dark energy is "a means of creating a perpetual motion envrionment" though? I've never heard that claim made.

I mean personally I think the theory of dark matter / energy is a patch for the perceptions not matching up with the theories, but that's besides the point.

oldandtired5• 3 years ago

If you listen to some of the experts (professional scientists) about the matter, their language gets very iffy very quickly. Especially when they says things like "dark energy driving the expansion of the universe at a faster rate". The implication is that "dark energy" is causing an increase in motion without generating waste energy.

What I find amusing though is the down vote. People don't seem to see the incongruity of the statements being made by these professional scientists and when something is sarcastically pointed out they just don't get it. In many ways, I think people have lost a sense of human about these matters and take themselves far too seriously.

As for dark energy/dark matter being a patch, I would wholeheartedly agree. I suspect that we will see more and more anomalies appear to cause either more additions or a fundamental change to occur in how we describe the universe as we see it.

It is fun to watch what is currently happening over very different fields of scientific investigation. I am thankful that I do not have to ascribe to any particular view as retirement, so to speak, allows me to read up and consider whatever fields take my interest at any point in time.

helpfulContrib• 3 years ago

The universe is in perpetual motion. This is a process that has been being refined since the very beginning.

Our ability to harness it and use it for our own intentions, not so much.

We don't have an energy problem.

We have an energy management problem - we are harvesting only the coarsest of it all, when we could be harvesting the finest, most refined of it, that is all around us ..

owenpalmer2• 3 years ago

Steve Mould is top-notch

martinmunk2• 3 years ago

This one is pretty good, but I usually steer clear of his videos. Topics are pretty on point for my interests, be he just seem... Too full of himself? I don't want to be mean in any way, but if someone agrees maybe they can put a finger on what it is

phailhaus• 3 years ago

This one is pretty representative of what his videos are like. Could be that you got a skewed first impression? Once you watch a few of them, you can see he's pretty genuine.

Retr0id• 3 years ago

There are a few youtubers that come to mind who fit this description, but Steve Mould is not one of them.

owenpalmer2• 3 years ago

Too full of himself? I'm not sure I understand, can you give an example?

Cthulhu_4• 3 years ago

I didn't get the impression he's too full of himself, but he was confident for sure. That's not being full of oneself though, that's making a video interesting, confidence, and not filling the space with caveats or self-deprecation.

legohead• 3 years ago

I feel like your mind must have confused two people. Steve is very down to Earth.

Maybe his youtube-battle with ElectroBOOM turned you off? Where he was pretty convinced he was right about the chain fountain.

masklinn5• 3 years ago

His voice and presentation style do give me the same feeling. I don’t know why. Same with Mark Rober.

But the actual content is the opposite. It’s really quite strange.

cycomanic• 3 years ago

What is your background? I know that many Americans perceive a British accent as snobbish/arrogant (this is often used in Hollywood movies as well). So maybe it's just that?

Bellend• 3 years ago

I don't know him but I feel he is a bit tongue-in-cheek with humour. As far as I remember, he did comedy and was also good with education with kids. I don't imagine meeting him and him coming across as full of himself though. I feel I could approach him in a pub and he would have good banter.

flavius29663• 3 years ago

Full of himself? He literally dresses in a tutu and spins in the mirror in this video.

koromak• 3 years ago

Damn I kinda want to build little doohickeys and sell them on etsy instead of going to work every morning

tnecniv• 3 years ago

Well then building doohickeys would be your new “going to work”

semireg• 3 years ago

Business is a great way to ruin a hobby.

Workaccount2• 3 years ago

I can tell you that this has two possible outcomes:

1. You don't sell enough to get by.

2. You sell enough for Chinese knock-offs to come in and offer a good-enough clone product for 1/3 your raw material cost.

Being a first world tiny shop in hardware is near impossible.

masklinn5• 3 years ago

(3) you make good looking gizmos which are not really worth copying seems to be the niche of “William”. Apparently the slides were about 150, and they’re externally simple but good looking. They’re out of stock but the shop has neat kinetic sculpture for high hundreds.

Could you get plastic versions for a third the price? Absolutely. Would you? Hell nah. I could see kits of spare parts to print and build your own, maybe, but not ready made.

newaccount74• 3 years ago

There are a bunch of tiny hardware shops in the audio community that seem to be doing fine, for example https://neurochrome.com/

Of course, running a small business like this is not easy, but it's not impossible either.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

You are then no longer selling the toy, but the “My one is OG” status. And the certainty that it will work. Once you reach a certain age fucking about returning stuff to save a few bucks seems silly.

luma• 3 years ago

Nothing stopping you! I have git and printables etc accounts full of stuff I've designed and shared, but some folks might just want the finished thing so awhile back I hung out my hat and started a small shop selling the widgets I design and share for free.

Turns out a lot of people just want the thing, I can give the plans away and still make some extra on the side by making a few to sell.

I'm incredibly far away from being able to quit my job over this, but it has turned a few of my hobbies into slightly net-profitable ventures instead of money holes and the result is a well appointed shop to spend my free time playing around with new ideas.

My advice: give it a shot. There's nearly zero up front cost and if nothing else, you'll probably learn a bit.

johnyzee• 3 years ago

This got me wondering if it could be made to be entirely mechanical. Like, the approaching ball triggers something to move in front of the magnet 'switching it off', then slides away again when the ball has passed, ready for the next run.

I think I just invented perpetual motion...

tempestn2• 3 years ago

No reason you couldn't do that as long as you just mean the actuation is purely mechanical. You'd still need an electromagnet and power source though, as it only works if you can turn the magnet on and off.

p1mrx3• 3 years ago

What do you propose to use as an energy source?

austinjp• 3 years ago

Just build a second machine to power the first!

djmips5• 3 years ago

clockwork wind-up. It would be bulky but maybe you could put a permanent magnet on a sled or wheel that would impart the necessary force on the metal ball as it approached but then and flipped repelled it. Would be difficult to make work smoothly or at all...

MetallicDragon• 3 years ago

Any mechanism that could switch the magnet on and off would require energy. E.g. you could put a magnet next to it with opposite poles, which would mostly cancel out the magnetic field, but would require a lot of force to push them together, which is work, and thus requires energy.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

The easiest perpetual motion is just drop a tennis ball. It is just that the perpetually moving thing is no longer the ball :-)

phelm• 3 years ago

I thought it was going to be a railgun

Cthulhu_4• 3 years ago

It can be if the magnet's strong enough!

tempestn2• 3 years ago

Huh, I'd always assumed the ball simply closed a circuit when it rode on the rails, and that's how it knew when to turn the magnet on and off, with suitable delays. It does seem to me you could still do it that way, but it'd probably be more difficult.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

This circuit is awfully complex.... it's possible to do the same with a far simpler circuit if you use the same coil for sensing and accelerating the ball.

A small microcontroller could do both - perhaps even with low enough power that the whole circuit could stay turned on for years on a charge (when not flinging the ball).

Looking at the total energy you need to impart on the ball, you should be able to do that with a far smaller coil and many fewer capacitors as long as you have a suitably shaped steel core to keep the flux path low. I suspect you might be able to do it with no capacitors at all, since modern lithium cells are perfectly happy to deliver 100 amps for a few milliseconds.

ape4• 3 years ago

An entire microcontroller to run an approx 3-line program?

polishdude20• 3 years ago

Cheaper than to have a microcontroller that results in a smaller PCB vs discrete components that make the PCB bigger.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

Using a single coil, the microcontroller program is pretty complicated. It needs to pulse the coil very briefly on a regular basis and measure the resonant frequency.

If you do the capacitor-less design, you might want to have a steel core with sawtooth top, and then use software to measure the position of the ball relative to each tooth and turn the coil on while the ball is heading towards a tooth and off when the ball is heading away. That allows the energy to be extracted from the battery slower.

You might also choose to have your coil driven by an h-bridge. That means you can put the energy from the magnetic field that builds up in the steel core back into the battery between each 'tooth'. That should dramatically increase energy efficiency, allowing you to use a smaller (cheaper, lighter, more eco friendly) cell or have the battery last longer. To do that, you'll need current sensing too.

NavinF• 3 years ago

That's very common. Look at all the $0.03 microcontrollers on LCSC. They save time, money, and board space.

mutatio• 3 years ago

Throw in a node.js implementation with 100 dependencies and we're cooking, simple as.

amelius• 3 years ago

You say that the circuit is complex, but it's the other way around.

Its simplicity is the cause of the high component count.

lolinder• 3 years ago

This circuit is awfully complex ... A small microcontroller could do both

Adding a microcontroller might reduce the number of components used, but it's a bit disingenuous to claim the result is "simpler".

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

I think you could drop coil sensing of the ball entirely and simply switch the electromagnet using the metal ball contacting the two metal rails. A dialectic gap in the rails near the bottom of the track could turn the electromagnet off at the right moment.

bagels• 3 years ago

Railgun instead.

djmips5• 3 years ago

I'd like to see the videos of your version!

p1mrx3• 3 years ago

Be aware that most of the cheap knockoffs just use a motorized wheel. For example, see the videos on https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09VTJ4LZ8/#ive-videos-for-this-pr...

BugsJustFindMe• 3 years ago

They also use diagrams showing the ball traveling the wrong way. https://imgur.com/a/o3sHFhX

dylan6045• 3 years ago

The art on most of Amazon's listings is just a thing of beauty, if you're into really bad photoshopping. Some of them are really eyebrow raising, while others are more WAT. I use it as a litmus test as clearly a knock off item, and move away from that listing.

harles• 3 years ago

Gotta love the description on theses:

No need for power, just press on the battery and use it.

dylan6045• 3 years ago

well, duh, you don't need power when it's got batteries. That's like emergency kit 101

crazygringo2• 3 years ago

It makes a horrible sound in the videos, but it's not obvious to me what you mean by "motorized wheel".

None of the mechanism is visible at all, certainly no wheel, motorized or not. How does a motorized wheel accomplish this?

slig• 3 years ago

Just guessing, but maybe there's some magnets attached to the wheel and they accelerate the ball as it gets near the bottom.

flutas2• 3 years ago

None of the mechanism is visible at all, certainly no wheel, motorized or not. How does a motorized wheel accomplish this?

Probably a simple spinning wheel inside of the ball collection area.

Spinning rubber wheel in the hole the ball drops through before getting on the track. Notice how the ball doesn't differ in speed at all after it's fallen, vs the original feels natural (gaining momentum) until it gets close to the bottom.

Edit: In one of the Amazon review images[0] you can see a black spot in the ball drop hole, maybe there.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/xb65ljL.png

divbzero• 3 years ago

I wonder if the creator of this device William Le [1] has managed to make this his full-time endeavor.

[1] https://www.etsy.com/shop/backtonaturedecor

rootusrootus• 3 years ago

He is selling a lot of them today. Another one every minute or so right now.

djmips5• 3 years ago

Hmm I wonder if he has enough already made or if it becomes a long backorder situation. 152 sold recently and it they are hand made it could take a while!

rendall• 3 years ago

How delightful. I was 99% sure even before I clicked that it would be Steve Mould.

Loved his parody of the fixed grin of Technology Connections.

thefourthchime• 3 years ago

Me too!

stouset• 3 years ago

Through the magic of buying two of them…

MikusR• 3 years ago

Even the outtakes.

bawolff• 3 years ago

Its cool, but it seems kind of obvious how it would work. Uou can tell the ball is speeding up at the wrong times. It'd be cooler if they could make the motion look more natural.

at_a_remove• 3 years ago

That would be definitely interesting. Myself, I could see the following developments:

1) More caps and work in it being powered by ambient light. 2) Taller, perhaps multi-stage. 3) Multiple paths that were somewhat random.

Really, I think I am inventing a cat toy. When I was small, I had a racetrack game with just enough randomness to keep my cat completely fascinated.

bibelo2• 3 years ago

I like the idea that the laws of physics allow us to draw conclusions with certainty, despite what our eyes observe: we are sure it's no perpetual device, since science says it's impossible.

Exactly with the Sun: our eyes observe that Sun goes around Earth, but science tells us otherwise.

Reminds me of the definition of Faith in the Holy Scriptures: "the evident demonstration of realities that are not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Yes, there are realities that exist beyond what we can see, that we can deduce with reasoning.

Edit: typo

moonchild• 3 years ago

The whole reason science works is that we start by assuming what our eyes tell us is true, and then come up with models to explain that.

Edit: plato believed the nature of reality could be discerned with pure reason. He was wrong.

Science also works only because it always assumes that its models may be wrong.

marginalia_nu2• 3 years ago

Exactly with the Sun: our eyes observe that Sun goes around Earth, but science tells us otherwise.

These are just two different reference frame. Both are equivalent.

OskarS• 3 years ago

Tell that to the 16th century Catholic church...

bibelo2• 3 years ago

so you mean the train is not moving?

srijanj• 3 years ago

The circuit is awfully complex

A clever “perpetual motion” device [video]

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