For the first week’s assignment in Energy, we had the task of flashing an LED by using an motor or magnet and wire. We tried quite a few things, the most successful being the use of a stepper motor to generate electricty, seen below:
I was really curious to see if a scrappier solution was possible using a magnet and wire. I based the construction of my setup on this video:
I definitely had some issues fabricating this structure, but ended up with something that vaguely resembled the structure in the video. I didn’t have the appropriate lightbulb to recreate the setup in the video, so I decided to just connect my multimeter to see what kind of voltage it yielded. I also “cheated” a bit by using a screw driver to spin my metal rod, rather than my own hands…
As you see, I was able to produce barely 0.01 V this way.
I wanted to compare this to what I could accomplish on a simple DC motor, seen below:
The DC motor yield 0.3 V when I just used my hands to spin its shaft.