DescentBB

this thing... is hard to describe.

at first glance it seems to just be a machine that drops water droplets into a pool. But what it's really doing is using very fast controlled strobing LEDs with very fast droplets - selectively illuminating the droplets in various positions.

so yeah... hard to explain. 50 seconds into it it gets REALLY cool, they do awesome things like the illusion that the water droplets are paused in midair, or even traveling backwards. It makes these awesome standing waves, paused splashes, it's really neat how they do it - just watch.

edit: http://cre.ations.net/creation/44 tells you howto make it.

edit2: this guy makes tons of awesome hacked together stuff
http://cre.ations.net/creator/natetrue
http://devices.natetrue.com/
like some kindof digital age Macgyver

Did you not do this in physics back in like high school?

It's like, \"Did you know that gravity acts on a body relative to the inverse square of its distance to another? BAM!!\"

That is sweet. I bet it would be awesome if you were high

this isn't a free energy device Topher it's a kinetic artwork. watch the video and reply with a \"woooooo\"

sweeet.... does he sell these things?

Buy a simple strobe light, go into your bathroom, turn on a faucet to be dripping quickly, and have fun.

the guy who made it said the strobelight isn't fast enough.

I'm with Topher and Snoopy. This is pretty old. I played with one of those things in a science museum once. They had a knob to adjust the frequency of the light. It was kinda cool, playing with the persistance of vision effects, but... meh.

Though I like the whole sticking a spoon in it thing. I'll admit I didn't think of that.

yea drak, but could you build the one in the museum by yourself?

That video is AWESOME. What a great application of this phenomenon. Better yet with instructions on how to build one of these for yourself..

So cool roid!

What a bunch of wet blankets you others are...I swear this place gets worse and worse. When do sticks in the arse become mandatory instead of optional but highly encouraged?

Ferno wrote:yea drak, but could you build the one in the museum by yourself?

I dunno about drak, but I can make a strobe of some sort on my own. I'm not sure I can produce the candle power that a normal strobe will produce, but I certainly make an LED strobe the outputs a decent amount of light.

True, strobes usually don't run at that high of frequencies, but the great thing about that system is that you can pull it off with as slow of a strobe as you want- you just get every, say, 10 drops instead of every single drop. It still looks the same to the naked eye, with the strobes being more pronounced.