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
