Tcepsa's Thoughts

The parts from the order that I placed back on craft night came in a few days ago. I've now got most of the means to get power from my motor to the part that actually needs to be rotating in the generator that I'm attempting to build. I've got a mess of little neodymium magnets (about 1/2" diameter). I've got a fairly sizable spool of copper magnet wire somewhere, but the gauge is higher than I'd like it to be (it's thinner than I really want) so I'm agonizing over whether to try to get some thicker copper, use the stuff I've got, or try silver (for mostly romantic reasons, though the fact that it technically is a better conductor than pretty much anything else also is appealing--practically, however, it is unlikely to make that big of a difference). I also have yet to make the part of the rotor that will actually hold the magnets--that's the biggest remaining hurdle. I think I've worked out a way to create a template using the GIMP (custom scripts rock!) so I can just follow the pattern when making most of the cuts and everything should line up as long as I'm careful. It's less "traditional" than making all of the measurements by hand, but I'm also reasonably sure it's less error-prone, and I want to get rid of as much error-possibility as I can.

I also need to build the stator/something to hold the whole thing as it's spinning, but I don't think that'll be as big of a challenge.

Of course, the rest of my life has been incredibly busy this week, so while I did get a chance to play with all the parts a little bit and get excited about how well it looks like they'll all fit together, it'll probably be at least next week before I can actually start making the rotor part... patience is a good thing!

If a bar magnet is oriented near a current-carrying wire so that the magnet's field lines cross perpendicularly to the direction that the current is flowing, and they are motionless relative to each other, the magnet will experience a net force of zero from the current in the wire.

(feel free to present examples to the contrary--if this statement is incorrect, I'd rather find out sooner than later ;)

[Technically, I think that the net force is still zero even if the magnet is moving relative to the wire as long as its distance from the wire remains constant and the magnetic field lines remain perpendicular to the wire. However, this should not strictly be necessary for this project, so it's more a point of trivia than anything really pertinent]