Different between Wandarama and Fun Fly Stick?

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SUMMARY

The discussion compares two electrostatic toys: Wandarama and Fun Fly Stick. Fun Fly Stick, developed by Unitech Toys Inc. and introduced in 2008, is recognized for its superior levitation capabilities despite Wandarama's slightly higher charge generation due to its dual roller design. However, Wandarama is considered a counterfeit product that entered the market later in 2009. Users report that both toys require maintenance to ensure optimal performance, particularly regarding lubrication, which affects charge generation.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of electrostatic principles and charge generation
  • Familiarity with the operation of electrostatic toys
  • Knowledge of materials with different electrical resistances, such as cardboard and metal
  • Basic concepts of triboelectric effect and charge dissipation
NEXT STEPS
  • Research the triboelectric effect and its applications in toy design
  • Explore the differences in materials used for charge accumulation in electrostatic devices
  • Investigate maintenance techniques for electrostatic toys to enhance performance
  • Learn about the physics of electrostatic charge and its effects on objects like hair
USEFUL FOR

Toy designers, educators in physics, hobbyists interested in electrostatics, and parents looking for safe educational toys will benefit from this discussion.

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Does anyone have any suggestions on what difference between Wandarama and Fun Fly Stick? which is a toy to generate electrostatic energy.
Wandarama is much cheaper than Fun Fly Stick, any difference in function?

[PLAIN]http://images1.lkimg.com/product-images--823855b7193d7827e1223ee80917d6b6ada61bac-e73cb4a144cf6653--jpg_sqthumb_med--toys-wandarama.jpg
http://www.harlemuk.com/assets/images/uploaded/products/33/liclmahvwggdw_orig.jpg
I read some comments as show below:
"... advice is to try taking off your shoes while operating and it will perform better."

Without insulator between myself and ground, will those stick attract more positive charges at one end?

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions
 
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Wandarama is a counterfeit. I am an inventor of Fun-Fly-Stick. Fun-Fly-Stick was first demonstrated on Toy Fair 2008 in NY, then it was on sale on Olympics 2008 in Beijing. After that by the end of 2008 it was introduced in the US by Unitech Toys Inc., CA

Wandarama entered market in autumn of 2009. It is a copycat.

See the US patent No. 7815484
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7815484…

There is no difference in functioning. The flying toys of Fun-Fly-Stick are better and levitate higher.

Your question on insulation. The better you are grounded the more positive charge is accumulated on the cardboard tube. It is in theory. Practically, your body dissipates negative charge that comes through your hand quite well, even if you are insulated from the floor. And there is no big difference in the height of levitation.
 
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mirk1960 said:
...
Your question on insulation. The better you are grounded the more positive charge is accumulated on the cardboard tube. It is in theory. Practically, your body dissipates negative charge that comes through your hand quite well, even if you are insulated from the floor. And there is no big difference in the height of levitation.

So will the positive charges on cardboard tube be strong by supplying more positive charges from the ground through my body? and my body will accumulate less negative charges when it is operating. Is there any reason using cardboard tube instead of metal tube? electrical charges will be moved faster through conductor.

After a period of time, if my body is ground, will my body be accumlated enough the negative charges to lift my hair?

ffs_maintenance.jpg


Referring to http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oFUD3l3VgeQ", I don't understand the reason for maintenance, does the leaking lubricant on roller create a bridge for short cut to cancel the charges? so it requires maintenance after a period of time, I read some comments, it requires to perform maintenance after playing for a hour.

Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions
 
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Cardboard instead metal. it will work well if you use metal tube instead cardboard but user will experience a slight electric shock touching the tube. That is not good for toys. So, I decided to use a material with high specific resistance. Paper under normal conditions is such a material. Paper is a "bad" conductor. It accumulates electric charge like metal but if user touches the tube, discharge is much slower and there is no feeling of electric shock.

We can compare that to discharging a capacitor to the human body. If you charge a capacitor to, say, 110 V and touch your body by both pins of it, you will experience an electric shock. If you discharge ithe capacitor to the body through a resistor, the discharge will go slower and you will not feel anything.

Safety was necessary to put the product on the shelves of toy stores.

I just discovered that a conductive sphere of a standard Van de Graaff generator can be made of a material with quite low conductivity. We still create an electric field around the paper tube and conductive flying toys get some charge from it through the contact with paper but we do not have an electric shock.

Lubricant. If there is an oil film beetween plastic roller and rubber belt, there is no triboelectric effect and both materials do not get charged. The triboelectric effect is the source of electric charge that is accumulated on the conductive or semiconductive sphere or tube in Van de Graaff generator. It would be good to use a ball bearing in the toy but it will just increase the manufacturing cost. Unitech Toys put too much oil in one of the manufacturing lot and they have customers' complaints on that. So, they explained how to clean it.
 
mirk1960 said:
Cardboard instead metal. it will work well if you use metal tube instead cardboard but user will experience a slight electric shock touching the tube. That is not good for toys. So, I decided to use a material with high specific resistance. Paper under normal conditions is such a material. Paper is a "bad" conductor. It accumulates electric charge like metal but if user touches the tube, discharge is much slower and there is no feeling of electric shock.

I would like to know if I want to get enough volt for lifting my hair, which following situation will be faster on using Fun Fly Stick: please see the images

1) I am insulated from the floor and the stick is isolated from the metal wall, the longer I operate it, the more charges my body get from cardboard.

2) I am insulated from the floor and the stick is touching the metal wall, the longer I operate it, the more charges my body get from cardboard.

If I cover the cardboard with aluminium foil, will it be faster to charges up between the metal wall and cardboard?

FlyStick.jpg


Lubricant. ... Unitech Toys put too much oil in one of the manufacturing lot and they have customers' complaints on that. So, they explained how to clean it.

Does it no lubricant apply to Fun Fly Stick from other distributor at this moment? so this issue would not happen anymore.

Do you have any suggestions?
Thanks you very much for any suggestions
 
Hair I think that in both cases the power of Fun-Fly-Stick(FFS) is not enough for standing hair. The quatity of charge delivered to your body per a unit of time will be lower then the quantity of dissipated charge (even if your body is insulated from the ground).

However, I think that in the second case, when the tube is grounded through the metal wall your body may get more positive electric charge as more negative charge can go to the ground than to the charge accumulator. Theoretically, your body should get a limitlessly high charge. However, your body also dissipates the charge. The higher charg it has the higher the dissipation intensity. You should try the second case. I have never done such an experiment. Generally, I would never advise it to kids. You may experience an electric shock.

We made other comparable experiments. Say, if you stand on a plastic chair holding the FFS in one hand and some metalized film in another hand and the tube is grounded, your body gets charged. When you open your palm the mylar goes up the same way as it goes up from the wand. Your bory repels it. I did not notice any move of hair.

You do not need a metall wall. Another person standing on the floor can hold the tube of FFS. Though real grounding is better.

Oil Both FFS and Wandarama have some thick oil to lubricate the axle of the upper roller. In most cases it does not make a problem.


I have to admit that Wandarama is slightly more powerful than FFS because it has two plastic rollers - teflon and nylon, FFS has teflon and metal. Wandarama generates some more charge than FFS but the levitation is worse because of more heavy flying toys.

Wandarama strikes sometimes. The lower roller in Wandarama is not grounded properly and the player feels some electric strikes in the finger that presses the button.

When I developed FFS I was not going to provide too much charge. I just wanted to generatete the minimal charge sufficient for levitation.
 
mirk1960 said:
Hair ...
However, I think that in the second case, when the tube is grounded through the metal wall your body may get more positive electric charge as more negative charge can go to the ground than to the charge accumulator. Theoretically, your body should get a limitlessly high charge. However, your body also dissipates the charge. The higher charg it has the higher the dissipation intensity. You should try the second case. ...

There is some concept I am not clear, once FFS is operated, I would like to know whether upper brush (cardboard tube) get positive charges or negative charges? I have talked to distributor, the side of upper brush is positive charges, if they are correct ...

In the case 1, should my body get negative charges?

In the case 2, should my body get more negative charges instead of positive charges?

Does my image show the correct flowing charges? am I on the right track?
Do you have any suggestions?


Thanks you very much for your suggestions
 
The distributor is right - upper brush and the cardboard tube get positive charge.

Your body always get negative charge.

When you do not touch the ground (metal wall) the cardboard tube accumulates the positive charge.

When you touch the ground by the tube, it will be discharging the positive charge to the ground. It will not accumulate the charge.

Your insulated body gets negative charge in both cases.


Van de Graaff is a machine that just separates charges - positive to one side, negative to another side. In addition, the charge of one polarity is accumulated on the sphere (tube), the charge of another polarity goes to the ground or to the body that dissipates it.

Generally, the ground is something that absorb the electric charge of any polarity.

In the case of my FFS - positive charge goes to the tube, negative to the body.
 
mirk1960 said:
...
When you do not touch the ground (metal wall) the cardboard tube accumulates the positive charge.

When you touch the ground by the tube, it will be discharging the positive charge to the ground. It will not accumulate the charge.
Your insulated body gets negative charge in both cases.
...
Generally, the ground is something that absorb the electric charge of any polarity.

" ... An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton."

Is negative charges (electrons) moving faster then positive charges (proton) based on their mass? if it is correct, the speed of discharging the positive charges to the ground is slower then the speed of getting negative charges from the ground, so if I touch the ground by the tube, will the cardboard actually accumulate the negative charges instead of discharging the positive charges to the ground as a result? If this is right, will I get unlimited negative charges from the ground in theory as long as my body is insulated from the ground? so I will accumulate enough volt to lift my hair, please correct me if I am wrong.

Thanks you very much for any suggestions





atom2.jpg
 
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  • #10
Sorry for the delayed answer.

You are right that, if the tube is grounded and your body is insulated,your body will get charged negatively.

I do not see here any relation to mass ratio of electron and proton.

You have to consider Van de Graaff as a constant current machine. It just separates electric charges of different polarity with constant speed. You need not go into the proton-electron mass ratio or other atom theory details

I am not sure that your hair will rise up. In theory it will but in reality your body dissipates the electric charge. It will accumulate enough charge only if the generator supplies it to your body more intensively than the body dissipates. However, Fun-Fly-Stick hardly can do that. It is not powerful enough.
 
  • #11
Is there anything special about the tube on this Flystick? My kids lost it and now the mylar is being attacted to the stick rather than repelled by it. I tried using paper as a substitute, but no luck. Thanks!
 
  • #12
No, just pay attention that there is no a thin plastic layer on the paper. A regular printer paper is ok. If you use a packaging paper, there is a chance that it is covered with a thin dielectric layer and that may cause the attaching of the mylar.
 

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