Zeven Rodriguez

LumiLife is a solar powered lantern that during the day sleeps and charges and comes alive with breath and light at night. It uses a nocturnal circuit and a motor control circuit to light up and bellow the lamp. It was designed and created by Susan Ngo and Zeven Rodriguez.

LumiLife from Zeven Rodriguez on Vimeo.

This is the diagram of how it all flows together.

The nocturnal circuit is made of a 74AC14

This is the schematic for the nocturnal circuit from the beam wiki site.

The motor controller circuit is composed of a 74AC14 and a 74AC240. The motor circuit was made from this tutorial on the beam wiki site. The parts include

74AC14 Hex Schmitt Inverter IC (the MicroCore chip).

74AC240 Octal Buffer / Line Driver with Tri-state Outputs (The Motor Driver).

.22 uF Monolithic Capacitors (Four).

10 uF Monolithic, Electrolytic or Tantalum Capacitors (Two).

2 Meg Resistors red-black-green (Four).

4.2 uF Monolithic or Tantalum Capacitors (One for the Reversing Circuit).

3 Meg Resistors orange-black-green (One for the Reversing Circuit).

1N914 or 1N4148 Diodes (Two).

This picture from the beam wiki site illustrates all of the basic connections for the 74AC14 microcore to work.

This is how to wire the 74AC240

The one thing missing from the graphic above is a cap going from pin 20 to pin 1.

This image shows how to connect the motors and connect the 74AC14 and 74AC240.

•Solar Panels
– Open circuit: 4x 4.5v @ ~20 mA
•Battery
– 3x 1.2v @ 600mAh
•Motors & LEDs = 3.6 @ 300mAh
– 2x Motors
– 6x LEDs

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Zeven and I are creating a solar powered tone generator for our final with a form factor of a spider. A miller engine circuit will power the “legs” which will act as switches to set off the tones.

We are using the simple LM 386 amplifier circuit and a hacked into Hex Schmitt Trigger. Both circuits are powered by four solar panels wired in Series and Parallel. The buzzing oscillator sound is a square wave and runs on 6 volts.

The Miller Engine Circuit is powered by 4 solar panels wired in parallel creating 80 -100 miliamps and 3 volts. A small geared page motor acts as a “leg” switch to turn on the audio circuit.

Right now we are having an issue with the miller engine. Our amperage for our circuit is being lost somewhere in our circuit. We are only getting 25mA out of a possible 130mA. After testing the capacitors, trigger, and transistor we have found out that those are not the problems. We now assume it could be the signal pin on the voltage trigger not letting all of the amperage through.

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For the first iteration of the pan ball flute, I decided to create a mock up of how this would work. The pan ball flute is set up like a piston in a car. This first iteration is using one magnet piston with a piezo buzzer, a led and a rectifier. The magnet induction piston uses 2 opposing 15 pound pull force magnets and a small magnet opposing the center magnet.

These are just some basic numbers on the solo shaker
The Open Circuit Voltage = 10v
The Test Capcitor = 1 Farad
Start and End Voltage = 100mV-3V
Change in Joules = 4.5J
E = 1/2 C * V 2

Time to Charge = 20 sec
Observed Power (watts) = .225 watts
Energy / Time

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Solar Presentation

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The Pan-Ball Flute is a hand crank device the pulls back a pinball style lever. Once the lever is let go a magnet advances passing through the coils and hitting a piezo. The crank has crowbar style forks that pull back the lever. The intention is that with combination of generators my hope is to power some piezo buzzers

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