Light Experimentation - Part 16: Minimised Motor Sounds and Ready to Test

The good news is the light effect is not bad but the motor sound is quite significant.

 I met up with Andreas to try to fix the motor sound, turns out the motor itself is actually quite quiet, it produces a squeaky sound only when the droplet mounts on it or when the support surface is 'solid', meaning metal, wood, etc. We used masking tape to cushion in between and the sound actually diminished. However if we don't secure the motor to the base / support, it is unstable so I have to look for more 'cushiony' ways to secure it. Andreas suggest that we look for a silent motor (could be DC) in the market if there is.

Jason and I tested with an existing DC motor but it's also quite noisy so we went back to Simlim to look for a 5RPM 12V DC silent motor and /or other stepper motors that may allow for a 'heavier' weight mount but we were not allowed to test with our resin droplet, which is understandable.

One of the motor specialists told us that all stepper motors produce the same sounds when something is mounted on it, plus all the DC motors we tested produce significant noises so our hope on finding a 'silent' motor is crushed and we could only rely on the 'cushions'.

Apparently when we placed the contraption (resin droplet mounted on stepper motor) on a bed, there is minimal sound so we went to daiso to look for possible materials to cushion the sound impact.

After some testings, we found out that this non-slip mat works the best. And instead of using screws to secure the motor, we used cable ties.

It's quite stable and spins well.

At this point, all of us have hallucinations of the motor sounds and any produced motor sound is considered 'noisy' to us and we could hardly differentiate if it's soft or loud anymore so we downloaded the dB Meter app, it's a frequency spectrum analyzer. We want to measure the sound level of the spinning resin droplet mounted on the motor.

From the video, we could see that when the droplet is not spinning, the sound of the environment is 28, and when the droplet spins, the sound produced is about 31-32, which means it is actually not noisy. Phew.
This is the final contraption, the pulsing is fixed, the motor is not noisy and the light effect is suitable. I can finally say that our light experimentation is done (for now) and it is ready for the experience testing.