Watch this rice-grain size motor clock over 100,000 RPMs

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Really, we’re more listening to it than seeing it (there’s not really much to see)

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um. ok. neat? I guess? Its a tiny motor. Whats the point of this? What are the mind blowing applications?

Lizard teeth.

Tiny drones that watch your every move, and nobody knows who controls them.

At least you’ll be able to hear them, based on this demo.

4 mm diameter? So that pencil is about 15mm in diameter? I guess it wouldn’t look as small next to a regular pencil.

For example, a shutter for a Q-switched pulsed laser.

Or a spinning mirror (together with other, slower mirror in 90 degrees) to scan a beam over a film or a CCD/CMOS sensor array, to digitize a fast signal in case of unavailability of fast ADCs (a 10-side prism yields us a million scanlines per second, a 1000 pixels-per-line then gives us a gigasample rate; then just expose the chip and clock the data out later at leisure). Or scan the data at a moving film strip, then develop and scan it in a film scanner and digitally read the darkness profiles of the lines.

Or a spinning mirror with a perpendicular grating; single-pass but gives us the entire spectrum plotted against time. For e.g. measurement of spectral characteristics of sparks or explosions.

Edit: Dumb as a rock I am, and/or the morning tea did not kick in yet. Divide the frequencies by 60. Fucking RPMs.

It might be useful in helping to couple MEMS stuff to things on the macroscopic level.

Although my first thought was a tiny little automated high-speed sewing machine.

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There are probably better solutions to be found in the chemical adhesives aisle; but if I were doing laparoscopic surgery (seriously, don’t let me do this, on you or anyone else) a sewing machine small enough to shove through a ‘keyhole’ incision and ready to microsuture whatever needed incising during the operation would be pretty cool.

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Incidentally, assuming you don’t already know this, laser printer optics modules have rather nice spinning mirror assemblies(not as fast as this; but getting the motor, the already-properly-balanced-and-polished mirror, and any handy motors in something that routinely gets tossed as scrap or sold for as little as $40 is pretty handy).

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I’m not volunteering to fabricate the system; but I’d be curious to know if the burning-out problem could be avoided by adopting the hydrogen cooling used in Big Serious Turbines? The stuff has surprisingly excellent properties for cooling, plus lower ‘air’ resistance than air.

I’d say yes.

Wrote a major part of exacty that article, couple years ago. Was doing research on the Chernobyl mishap, and wondered why they had hydrogen generators in the turbine hall.

Incidentally, some modern hard drives use helium fill for the same purpose.

We need small simple hydrogen production modules so people could have fun with experiments… Are there some cheap hydrogen sensors? Could pieces of car catalyst be used for recombination of hydrogen in air, or residual oxygen in hydrogen? Would a Peltier cooler be enough to freeze enough water off the hydrogen stream, or would a chemical sorbent have to be use (ideally with heat regeneration so there are no consumables)?

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4mm x 12mm isn’t really all that small is it? Vibration motors in phones are smaller than that.

Those don’t go 100k RPM.

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