| Hi DanBc, Thanks a lot! Wow... were to start.. Perhaps the biggest problem i had was preventing the ferrofluid to stain glass and aluminum frame i used for the screen. I tried to get some help on the faculty of chemistry here in Belgrade, but no real success. Finally after months and months of experimenting with different liquids, you start to feel and "undertand" the way ferrofluid behaves.. very strange :) Its still not perfect but im working on perfecting it. The first time i sketched the project seemed very easy, i will make a matrix of electromagnets and simply attract the ferrofluid. It actually gave some results but i realized that having a system that requires a huge amount of electricity to be spent all the time to simply show a number thats fixed - is not elegant. Here is one of the videos i recorded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvp7bWe-M94 So finally i decided to go with neodymium magnets and mechanics. Building this from scratch was a crazy adventure of lots of lathe machining and cnc machining and so on. I had no training basically i had to learn all along the way. I used illustrator for the most of the construction, since i am UI/UX designer, and finally gave it up and learned solidworks so i can make a whole 3d model of the clock and assemble all parts in 3D. For the next project i think i will have to curb the need to make it "perfect", i lost A LOT of time beacuse of this. For example each time i wanted to make a screen for this i had to buy a glass, cut it on waterjet, then drill a hole, then glue to the frame that needed to be cut on waterjet also and polished before adding adhesive and so on. And once it does not work, i have to do it all again... |
e.g.: http://www.eclipsemagnetics.com/media/wysiwyg/datasheets/lif...
I know very little about them, other than that they're cool. The ones in that datasheet start about at about 2kg, so I don't know if you can get them small enough for your purposes.