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Push / Pull spinner from VCR parts
krutknut:
I'd say go ahead and make a fortune!
SithMaster:
I'm following this intently. Good work so far. :cheers:
krutknut:
Thanks! Good to hear that someone wants to see how this goes.
A first attempt at the push/pull assembly. As you see in the picture where the spinner spins, there is no annoying wobble. As you see in the other picture, there are two springs, one above and one below the top (spinning) part, both springs are taken from a VCR.
As you see, I have simply mounted a piece of metal on four metal rods, cut from a cheap long piece. The scrap metal was taken from a computer, there are usually pieces like that on stationary computers, protecting unused slots for dvd players and such. The holes on the piece (luckily) matched holes in the VCR head perfectly. But it would not have been too difficult to make a custom piece, of course. VCR heads usually has a few holes that can be used to mount something like this.
The next thing to do is to mount something that can press a pair of up / down microswitches as the spinner moves up and down. And also to mount an optic wheel that I have to make.
krutknut:
I have now made and attached a simple 125-spoke optic wheel. It's the usual kind of wheel, made of 5 layers of transparency sheets. It moves up and down with the spinning wheel, so the optic reader probably has to move up and down with it as well.
krutknut:
I have now attached two cherry switches to the push/pull mechanism. The mechanism is simply a piece of thin metal that acts as a lever. It rests on the lower spring so that it moves up and down with the spinner. There is a small washer in between the metal lever and the bearing, so that the lever does not spin. In this way, the push/pull mechanism is isolated from the spinning wheel so that pushing and pulling does not interfere with spinning.
I would have preferred to use a switch that demanded a bit less force to be pressed. Some kind of lever-based switch maybe. But this works just fine.
In the picture, you see that I removed the optic wheel to work on the push/pull mechanism. I now also need to attach the wheel and an optic reader.
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