Science: Radio
AM Radio Powered Vehicle   (+7)  [vote for, against]
Nikola Tesla claims to have done it first but if so the proof was taken by Trump's uncle when they raided his room after his death. [link]

I think I figured out how he did it several years ago now but it's looking more and more like it is a project so far down the list of priorities that I highly doubt I will ever get around to seeing if I can get it to work the way it does in my head.

Maybe you guys will be able to tell me why it wouldn't work.

Okay so I picture stripping the motor out of a lightweight car like a VW bug and replacing it with two counter-rotating flywheels on spokes which weigh exactly enough less than the original motor to swap in electric drive motors for all four tires turning the bug to all wheel drive.

Between the spokes of each of the two vertically oriented flywheels is a metal rod with a weighted end, (how much weight needs to be tinkered with), and this rod is capable of receiving a radio signal which causes it to oscillate at an adjustable frequency.
This frequency is timed so as to occur just milliseconds before the rod reaches vertical orientation and imparts its teeny bit of energy to the flywheel's rotation in exactly the same way a child can get a swing moving even without being able to touch the ground.
The flywheels outer surface is covered in magnets of alternating polarity and when copper windings surrounding the spinning flywheels are brought within close proximity electricity is produced for the drive wheels.

A crystal AM radio and an antenna are the only power source, and since the flywheels will be increasing in rotation every single second that the car sits idle, or while its running, it should get some fairly decent range.

A governor ensures that the flywheels do not exceed their maximum rotation rating unless plugged into a docking station where they feed energy back to the grid.

The same principal should be able to be used for a home generator.

Convert vibrational amplification to rotation. Rotation to electricity.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 11 2022

https://ca.style.ya...cted-115511618.html [2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 11 2022]

M'man Nikola campin in my neck o' the woods. https://driveteslac...ant-sandon-bc-1897/
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022]

Cascade city. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=187915
[2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022]

The Dzhanibekov Effect https://www.youtube...watch?v=1VPfZ_XzisU
Worth a watch. [RayfordSteele, Mar 14 2022]

I don't have the energy to analyze this, so I'm bunning it.
-- Voice, Mar 11 2022


Well of course something like is would "work". Its all about efficiency losses though. Energy source => mechanical energy at the power station => electricity => radio transmitter => receiver => back to mechanical energy in the vibrating rod => flywheel => back to electricity through the permanent magnet generator => back to mechanical energy in the motors => the car moves! (maybe). Have a vibrating bun {-:-}
-- pocmloc, Mar 11 2022


hmmm, I understand very little of what you've just said, but I think you may be misunderstanding me.

It makes no difference how much energy the wave being transmitted through the weighted rod has. If the weighted oscillation rod can incrementally retract then an absolute minimum of wave can be made to oscillate a flywheel up to whatever RPM the rod can oscillate at.

Only the teensiest bit of energy is needed. Strapped into a human-gyroscope I was able to attain six or seven revolutions per second just using my own head as the weighted rod in just a few seconds before whatever I was doing started un-threading the bolts holding the entire contraption to its frame.
In other words, I dispute your eleven million hour charge time.

-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022


Thank you for the numbers, [LimpNotes]; I'm going to bun this anyway, imagining it as a toy-maker's challenge. [+]

Maybe one day microbots will ride this car to work.
-- pertinax, Mar 12 2022


Oh yeah, a couple of side notes for any of you guys who care to know;

One: I had a 6400 sq. ft. building collapse under snow load a few days ago and so the remaining five year time on my sentence has been extended by at least a year.
On the bright side, I could have been working in there when it happened instead of at five AM... and there must be a couple hundred grand in salvage I have no intention of taking to the dump, so we swap a potential mass death trap for many cabins worth of building materials which aren't getting any cheaper.
The bigger the negative, the bigger a positive I can turn it into.

Two, (and this one is pretty cool I think), Remember I was telling you guys that there was dwindling proof that Nikola Tesla had actually set foot on this side of Canada and that an attempt seems to have been made to scrub it historically since this place is where AC won out over DC and Edison lost his shit?
Well a friend of mine stumbled on it finally and it turns out he lived right here for three months and built four dams in the area and one of them is still in operation and charges Musk's electric vehicles named for him.
[link] 2
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022


// Believe it or not, just nodding your head imparts more energy to your immediate surroundings than the radio tower example previously cited.//

Of course it does but it seems to me to be a matter of scale.
The faster the flywheel spins, the less energy was needed by my neck to increase its speed, so yes, it would take forever to spin up to speed from a stand-still but get it spinning even by hand and it will only increase in RPM while you sleep.

//I understand what you are saying but I am starting at you power source. I am basing my calculations on the laws of physics that pertain to the conservation of energy. If you've broken these laws, and have created more energy than you have put in, that would be something, but I don't think you have.//

I don't think I have either, no free lunches and all that, but is the math you've done been based on a single weighted rod, and does the math change with the number of weighted rods oscillating continuously instead of waiting a full revolution for their turn to wiggle and retract?

//Maybe one day microbots will ride this car to work.//

Good enough for the girls I no longer chase.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022


Huh. So You're saying that the same small amount of energy distributed to multiple rods wouldn't change the amount of energy imparted to a flywheel as opposed to a single rod receiving the same amount of energy.

Is that true?, because it sounds like you're saying a small antenna works as well as a large one to me.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022


Interesting. I need a visual other than the one already in my head then.
In my head I see a flywheel incrementally increasing in speed while needing less and less energy to increase it, (regardless of weight), on a sliding scale as rotation increases to the point where the momentum transmitted to the weight of that flywheel by that teensy bit of energy becomes vast because it constant and passive.

I can't un-feel what it was to be the rod within the gyroscope.
I could make it do whatever I wanted... from the inside, and I'm telling you, the faster it gets the less energy it needs to accelerate on a curve.

Proximity to a gravity well plays a huge role. Is that in your equations?
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022


In the meantime, the swing is just energy storage, and doesn't play into a steady-state power equation as power is taken out to move the vehicle.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 12 2022


Ah. I see.

I had pictured that the inertia of the mass of the flywheel would come into play at some point, in the same way that a spinning train wheel is harder to stop than a ten-speed tire.
There should be a point at which the eddy current drag required to power the motors would become negligible and allow the tiny input of energy to overcome it.
If it worked that way then the flywheels could be brought up to speed before engaging the wave-drive mechanism and once the energy needed to gain that speed were recouped the radio wave alone would continue to increase rotational speed.

It wouldn't be free energy, but it would be bloody cheap.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 12 2022


Reading all this makes my head hurt, but I think you can make this. +
-- xandram, Mar 12 2022


//In my head I see a flywheel incrementally increasing in speed while needing less and less energy to increase it, (regardless of weight), on a sliding scale as rotation increases to the point where the momentum transmitted to the weight of that flywheel by that teensy bit of energy becomes vast because it constant and passive.//

I'm not following this. The energy of a flywheel is proportional to the square of it's rotational speed. As it spins faster, it requires parabolically more energy to do so.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 13 2022


//I'm not following this. The energy of a flywheel is proportional to the square of it's rotational speed. As it spins faster, it requires parabolically more energy to do so.//

I do not think this is true, not if the energy comes from 'within' the flywheel itself using oscillation. This is my own invention I call Gyroscillation and it has not been studied as far as I have been able to determine other than in my own thoughts.
The faster the flywheel spins, the less distance the internal rod needs to shift to deliver force. The wave form needed becomes tighter and tighter to where it doesn't matter how much energy an AM radio signal broadcasts... only the frequency matters, not the strength of the wave.

I figured out how to use the same principal to turn the orientation of any spinning flywheel of any weight 180 degrees in a single revolution without torque precession.

Oh, you wont find that in any of your literature either... yet, having been the rod within the gyroscope, I already know it to be true.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022


// I do not think this is true, not if the energy comes from 'within' the flywheel itself using oscillation. This is my own invention I call Gyroscillation and it has not been studied as far as I have been able to determine other than in my own thoughts.//

Sorry but it's true. The mechanics of flywheels have been well-understood for literally eons. There's no mystery nor mystery energy nor room for any, despite your fun with spinning slightly off-balance bike tires.

Here is the equation. It's very simple, and works both ways regardless.

E=1/2 * I * w^2. Where I is the rotational moment of inertia about the relevant axis and w is the rotational speed in radians per second.

If you have moving parts in the flywheel, you're just affecting I. And there's static and dynamic friction in the picture to consider. Nothing revolutionary about revolving.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 13 2022


If you bonk a tuning fork and then retract the tines does the pitch change?
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022


[A1] it was only this bit here;
"In 1897, Nikola Tesla relocated from New York to Christina Lake in rural British Columbia for three months. The inventor came to the region to install four of his 60-hertz generators."
my only point was that the dude actually set foot here. Nothing else.

//E=1/2 * I * w^2. Where I is the rotational moment of inertia about the relevant axis and w is the rotational speed in radians per second.//

I'm sorry but I am for all intents and purposes mathematically illiterate.
Not intentionally, but illiterate none the less. Does any of the math on flywheels indicate that they can be made to flip 180 degrees in a single revolution without resistance using an internal oscillator? Or is every bit of math on the subject of forcing a flywheel to tip all about precession and resistance to tipping?

[LimpNotes] then a single tine tuning fork within a flywheel can incrementally speed up its rotation every revolution by retraction without adding any extra energy to the system. Sure it might take forever to reach any useful speed.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022


2fries, the equation is more basic than flywheels- it relates energy to speed. The simple way to think about this is that an object moving twice as fast has four times as much kinetic energy (that is, energy due to its movement).
-- Loris, Mar 13 2022


I get what you guys are saying.
Yes a human can get a swing going and impart energy by oscillation alone but I'm trying to get an ant to do it.

hmmmm...
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022


//Maybe. But there’s no evidence presented other than another Tesla fan saying so - and the “Tesla” generator they use as a tourist attraction was made by Westinghouse and installed nearly 20 years after his supposed visit.//

I suppose that itself is not evidence but it's just another tidbit of what is common knowledge of the old folks around here.
If there were abundant evidence I wouldn't be going on about that knowledge having been historically scrubbed by Edison.
Although it does not state that Nikola himself visited, this is what the plaque at the base of the falls reads. [link]

"Cascade came into being during the late-1890s as a bustling railway construction town claiming 17 hotels at its height. Its location along the Canada-U.S. border proved strategic for mining, freighting, and hydro-electricity. The early development of Cascade is credited to the Columbia & Western Railway, but it became renowned for its hydro-electricity which powered the Boundary district. The Cascade Water, Power and Light Company powerhouse and dam was built between 1899 and 1902, and was the proving ground for Nicola Tesla's 3-phase, 60-cycle power. Though the town is gone and the powerhouse abandoned, the Cascade Gorge remains as impressive today as it was over a century ago."

Edison took himself a big ol' dump on the entire Boundary Country region and his animosity wasn't towards Westinghouse but to the Serbian up-start making him look like a fool.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022


//He’s got high hopes…//

Heh.
When I used to do cartoons for a local paper one of the first one's published was of an ant in a straight jacket getting hauled into a padded room screaming; "I'm not crazy I tells ya I CAN move rubber tree plants!"
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 13 2022


//I did find a story that explains Tesla being in your area in 1897. It’s quite different from how you tell it though. Not developing generators or building the power plant - but installing motors and cable hoist systems for a mining company. If that story checks out, you were at least partly right.//

That's awesome!
My only angle is in trying to determine that he actually set foot here. Why he set foot here is completely irrelevant. Even proving that Edison fragged the whole region pales in comparison.

Thanks eh!
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 14 2022


As far as flywheels flipping 180 degrees, check out my veritasium video that explains what's going on.
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 14 2022


//As far as flywheels flipping 180 degrees, check out my veritasium video that explains what's going on.//

Okay cool.
"I" can do that in a gravity well and can prove that it can be done from within the flywheel without microgravity. There's no science on that phenomenon I can find. I call it Gyroscillation. Any gyroscope can be controlled internally using fluctuations to the symmetry of those oscillations. It doesn't matter what direction the change enters from... the ripples propagate.

//[2_fries], I was editing a previous anno and somehow botched it. Short version, you should be getting an email from the author of that Tesla essay I linked, with more info about his 1897 trip to Canada. ?//

Sweet.
Sorry about that. If there's a glitch in your system, I 'will' accidentally find it.

It's like my super-power.

Shittier one I can't think of, but there you have it.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 15 2022


Shit! I watched that entire video [RayfordSteele].
I intuitively understand the effect.

I'm saying that the same effect can happen if you are the pendulum within the gyroscope while within a gravity well.

I 'know' it.

I don't know much... but I know that.

What that understanding means in the long run I don't know.

I just know that I can visualize physics... and that this visualization needs a smack upside the head every so often to get it work right.

...

Maybe this is one of those times.

...

Doesn't feel like one though.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 15 2022



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