Rising Water is a project for our advanced physics class at Animas high school. Our class consists of two seniors, Cole and Evan, and a two sophomores, Taylor and Kian, and our teacher Kurt. We started to study a phenomenon called the Wagon Wheel effect. The Wagon Wheel effect is the perception off light of a moving object being interrupted rapidly as the object moves making the object look as if it is moving in the opposite direction that it is spinning. We see this most of the time on TV or video with vehicle wheels. The rims of the wheels look to be moving in the direction of the vehicle then at a certain point the rim will start to look as though it is going backwards. The reason this happens is due to the camera breaking up the light into frames. We wanted to demonstrate this effect and looked for a project to show it. We found a YouTube video by isaac879 and his RGB time fountain project. We wanted to replicate his project and began planing it.
We started by creating a 555 timer circuit to try and control a small set of LED's to flash rapidly. We then studied mosfets and how they work and adding them into our basic circuit. Next, we tried to run some strips of RGB LED's using our circuit. After succeeding with that we moved into controlling our frequency of the blinking LED's with an Arduino using the mosfets to ground switch the lights. While doing this we also created a voltage divider to limit the amount of voltage coming to the Arduino while also fully powering the LED's.
Next, we added more to the code and after some trouble shooting we added the color changing function. This took some time because we had to figure out how to use a potentiometer to fade in and out of the three primary colors allowing us to create a whole host of colors. After some tedious math work we figured it out and moved on.
This lead us to our final product as shown below.
We use a simple water pump to push water to the top and create a steady stream of dripping water. As the water is falling we then use our strobing LED's set to a specific frequency enabling us to make it appear like the water is falling slower or even falling up.
This is the schematic for our circuit. The download for it is in the Hardware section. The file is for Fritzing. See notes under download for minor changes to the LCD portion.
Comments
Please log in or sign up to comment.