This is what your basic DC
motor gearbox looks like. The gear configuration helps to slow it down
and provide more torque than just the motor spinning by itself.
The instructions that came
with the kit are a challenge to understand. Luckily they have great
illustrations to guide you in the right direction.
You can arrange the gears in
a way that gives you 4 choices of speed. Consider this an advanced
project. Those gears are small and you really need to get it just
right for a smooth operation. It took me about 2 hours of messing with
it to finally get some decent results. If you do order this kit you
might want to add on one of their DC transformers for only 5 bucks.
The video above describes
what the advertising display industry calls a solar rocker motor.
It uses a tiny solar cell
that self starts the motion and keeps swinging till the light is taken
away.
I'm thinking this could
easily be adapted to a small AAA battery for night operations. The
company that sells them is currently out of stock and has no plans to
build any more in the future, but you might find one in a small store
moving some sort of advertisement back and forth. Offer the person
behind the counter 20 bucks and see if you can't negotiate a deal to
take it home for some back yard deer deterrent experiments of your own.
It's unclear if this is
strong enough to create a banging sound, but the movement is worthy of
more research.
Here's another product that
might be worthy of replicating for the back yard deer deterrent
experimenter.
It's called a solar
powered bird repeller and
was designed for boats. Expect to pay just under 100 bucks once you
factor in shipping. I like the fact that it comes with a AA battery
back up for extended operations during dark stretches although I doubt
if it would have enough juice to spin all through the night.
The design would be easy
enough to copy with some sort of slow moving motor. You could delete
the solar cell if you can manage to run some electricty that far.
The zone of protection would be limited unless maybe you mounted a
whistle on one of the ends or had it rub something in a way that
created unnatural noise.
I decided my first attempt at
making a do
it yourself interval timer
from one of these solid state units was worth another try, and then
another one after that.
The units pictured above do
about the same thing as the 32391 I tinkered with a little over a
month ago.
I've still got this nagging
feeling one of these can be modified to work as a functional interval
timer, but I'm not sure what type of capacitor should be added or
exactly how it would be wired to handle a 120 volt load.
This series of failures has
prompted a completely new direction in regards to the locomotion behind
the dc motor powered deer deterrent. This new design will provide a means to
adjust interval timing without a complex circuit. Stay tuned for more details as the new prototype begins to take shape.
