Recent content by WorldWiz

I need a method to accelerate a ball bearing down a pair of wire tracks, and to generate a consistent amount of force on every activation. Please critique my tentative design: I want to use an inductive coil activated by a proximity sensor to generate a transient EM field to accelerate the ball...

I want to pull it in. My initial plan was a solenoid-like coil wrap with the tracks running through the coil, but then I started thinking it might better to place the coil beneath the track to ensure that there’s some force holding the ball on the tracks. Either way, I expect to be testing about...

Ah, sorry, I didn’t clarify that I only intend to make an inductor coil to accelerate a ball bearing along a wire track (not a coil gun, btw) in my personal project, and I just want to maximize power use efficiency. I will look into the terms you provided though. Thanks.

My guess is that the coil length, l, is measured perpendicularly to the wrap direction, so therefore would be greater in the toroid, but the bar allows for more layers of wire, and so would ultimately have a higher possible maximum for achievable field strength?

Sorry for my lack of terminology. Basically the two wrapping styles below:

All the inductor components I’ve see are made with a circular core instead of a cylindrical core. Are there any advantages to this design in terms of field strength relative to input current (assuming the same number of turns of wire)? In the field strength equation, is “coil length” always...

Thanks for such a detailed guide. This gives me more confidence that my project can still work.

Watching this exhibit from years ago () led me to think that ball bearings will bounce really well from steel glockenspiel bars, but that wasn't the case when I tested this myself with a stainless steel ball bearing and a steel glockenspiel bar. Granted, I was just propping up the bare...

@anorlunda I hadn't considered wooden balls before, but I can definitely see how that may work out in terms of bounce and sound. I'll definitely look into that. Thanks for the suggestion! @Baluncore In that case, the problem I've been having must be largely due to the variable degree of spin...

@berkeman 1. I'm not familiar with what a"striker composition" is, and I'm not getting anything from google either, but I'm not sure a comparison between glockenspiel and piano keys is accurate, since glockenspiel keys intrinsically produce sound like xylophone or marimba keys, which do not...

@berkeman I also tested with rubber balls, which actually don't bounce AT ALL because the glockenspiel vibrates, and I tested with steel ball bearings, which bounce very poorly (and both of them also sound a lot worse), so I don't know if there's any good solid balls that I could use, as much as...

@berkeman You'd be surprised, actually. I'd already tested a ping pong ball on a glockenspiel set, which has steel bars, and when I dropped a ball onto it, not only do I get a crisp sound, but the ball bounced exactly as well as you'd expect it to bounce against any hard, smooth surface. So I...

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes this is regarding the same project I asked about before; at that time I was just brainstorming, and unfortunately since then, with school- and work-related responsibilities, I haven't progressed much beyond the drawing board aside from a simple prototype I cobbled...

I'm looking for recommendations for a relatively low-budget launching mechanism design for launching ping pong balls with high accuracy and high precision (able to consistently land within a 0.5 cm radius of a fixed point located about 30 cm away from the launcher). I've tried constructing a...

Having the ball bouncing against the rails hasn't been a problem, because I accelerate the ball at the bottom of the slope just before it reaches the curved rails (imagine a capital letter "J" tilted ~60 degrees clockwise; the ball rolls down the straight part, and then gets accelerated forward...