hey everyone it's norm from tested happy friday and i have a quick show and tell for you today uh
it is another exploration in led lighting but it's super simple no big project but it is a
really really cool piece of kit this was brought to our attention via our friends at adafruit who
also learned about this from maker and youtuber naomi wu and i've been really curious about this
for a long time so you've seen it in the thumbnail and the youtube description we're talking about
wireless led lights uh it's a thing that actually works and exists a couple years
ago there was a company called xbase out of japan that ran a kickstarter campaign
and the promise was that they would have a display stand that you could put maybe your gundam models
or your small figurines and you can light them up with these tiny led lights that would not
need to actually be wired they would be powered through inductive charging through the same basic
fundamental technology as the kind of wireless you know contact based chargers that you would have
charging a qi charger on your smartphone and other technologies out there it's been around
for a long time fundamentally we're talking about you know two coils copper coils a primary coil
and a secondary coil there's electromagnetic field generated and in that volume uh you can
actually transfer some current from ac over to dc and adafruit has started stocking up on uh
two versions of a kit and i was able to get the small version so that's what we have here for 15
what you get is this coil uh with a little bit of circuit board here
uh it's five volts so we're going to plug this in to our handy usb power supply uh and then it also
comes with an assortment of these wireless leds very very basic this is their small coil which
is about three inches in diameter so we're talking about in terms of millimeters what is this get our
handy calipers out here 70 or so 70 millimeters in diameter uh there's also one that's much larger
at uh 10 inches in diameter and the larger the coil the uh the bigger the volume that the field
that's generated so the more options you have in placing these led lights
but let's get a quick demonstration to see how this works so we're gonna go plug this
in i'm gonna first make sure i adjust my usb power supply to 5 volts right here and then we're just
going to make sure our leads are connected you could of course use any power supply of
your choice as long as you have the right voltage here so 5 volts works just fine out of this usb
port and we got our positive and negative leads so we're going to put this off the side here and
have a good view of the coil again uh about three inches and you can already tell there's a little
bit of light happening on this this led i'm gonna uh get these out of the baggie they are rather
tiny and delicate and fragile uh so very easy to lose as well so i've actually had to pick a
few off the floor but there you go wow they've lit up immediately there are 10 that come with
a pack and a wide range of colors so you have blue red green yellow and white and we'll just put them
right in the center here be careful not to lose them but put them in here
and what i'll do is i'll turn off the lamp so you can see how bright these are and how they're lit
a couple interesting things so the orientation of the coils here actually
has an effect on how strong the light is i'm going to pop these all so they're facing up
and you can see the ones that are on their side
not so much they really prefer to be pointed up and down
and then we'll pick one up and move it around so you can get a sense of
the volume and where that field is um at about this three inch diameter you're only going to
get about a couple inches above or below this coil for for operating light and as i move
this white light around you can see it starts losing some of that power still lit up here that's
about three inches and if i'm directly above it yes but it's basically very dim at this point
and loses power right around there so that's actually not so bad it's about
four inches before it really loses all its power and then outside of the coil you can't really go
much outside so yeah not really there's a little bit right there it's not bad not bad
yeah so you get maybe a couple inches outside that circumference
and it really is strongest
right above this kind of cylinder area even the center it's actually pretty good if i rotate
it so off axis you can see that it's actually dimming slightly i don't know if you can notice
that i see it with my eye it's dimming slightly as i turn it 90 degrees but still operating
and if i set this down and move the coil itself
you can see it actually still operates when they're underneath the coil around that same
distance as well so you start losing power once the coil is low about four inches away
and so you're really anchored to the um this diameter here
and this circumference of the volume around above and below that coil and we'll do one
more demonstration one more test if i put a couple of these on some acrylic
again oh they just wanna pull around
it does transfer the power through let's say two sheets of acrylic yeah
through material no problem and that's kind of the magic of this that these little lights
don't need to be physically wired to any power uh it's just running it through that em field and if
you can hide the coil the primary coil underneath some type of display uh or embedded in something
there's a lot of interesting opportunity to have a diorama display within of course the limitations
of uh this this this volume here the larger coil uh 10 inches gives you a height of about six
inches above it where you can activate the lights so it's not that much more but i still think it's
more meaningful than this three inch uh coil and one of the neat things if you take a look at
these lights and maybe i'll give you a little bit more illumination uh we'll zoom in just a
bit so you can just see exactly how these look and exactly how tiny they are let me get one of this
this green one right here so you can see there's a light here and then a tiny
copper coil underneath it and we're talking about the whole thing is about uh 4.78 millimeters tall
and with a diameter of under 4.6 millimeters so under 5 millimeters which is
really really tiny and when you think about places you can potentially put this these lights one of
them that came to mind is lego and so i've brought out my lego ideas ecto-1 that we put together
a couple years ago and if you look at like a headlamp here we'll take one of these blue leds
it actually does fit very nicely into the cavity of a lego a hollow lego stud
with plenty of room on either side and you can affix them maybe with you know
something like glue dots so we can grab these little glue pads very handy tiny adhesives
place in here
and kind of fit that in
and you can tell it's giving a little bit of illumination there yeah you're really
limited by kind of the size of the coil and that working volume and unfortunately the
larger 10 inch one is out of stock these things are selling as soon as adafruit can stock them
but include links in um the description below so you can get an email notification whenever they do
become in stock but for 15 bucks getting 10 of these wireless leds and a coil to mess around with
is just a lot of fun and a great deal you can look on ebay and i think the xbase kickstarter they
sell i believe compatible leds a little pricey i think like two dollars per led is the cheapest
i've been able to find them you can buy a 10 pack sometimes for like 30 in a variety of colors um
and that's something i hope adafruit gets a chance to stock in the future buying extra packs of just
these diodes so you can you have one coil and have a lot of options for lighting but just to have fun
and get started a coil 10 lights 15 bucks it actually works uh and almost works like a little
bit of a magic trick but of course it's science it's physics uh and it's a lot of fun so go
check it out uh and hope you enjoyed this little show and tell have a wonderful weekend and we'll
be back next time with more lighting and diorama projects i'm norm and i'll see you next time bye