A friend gave me a mirrored mushroom that threw many light beams when hit by the morning sun streaming through my east window. Nothing exceeds like excess, so I looked around and found a small, 4 rpm turntable powered by a USB dongle. I didn't want any wires for Ms. Kitty to chew on, so I also ordered a couple 5V solar cells to connect to it with the shortest possible cable.
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| The Disco Shroom. Pen for scale (I didn't have a banana...) |
I designed a base to hold both the solar cell and the turntable with wires hidden so Ms. Kitty can't chew on them. You can see it all below.
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| CAD render of the base for the disco shroom. The solar cell is mounted at about 45 degrees and wires feed through the tunnel that connects the hollows in the print. The whole thing sits 75mm above the window sill so the window frame doesn't cast a shadow on either the solar cell or the disco shroom. |
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| Printing the base on UMMD. I printed with 1 mm nozzle, 2 mm walls, and 15% triangle infill. It took about 18 hours to finish the print and used 1200 g of PETG filament. |
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| The finished print. |
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| Wires stripped, twisted, and soldered to the solar cell. I put some hot melt glue over the solder points to protect them- probably not necessary. |
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| Double sided foam tape (red) used to hold the solar cell in place. |
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| Wires are fed through the tunnel to the turntable mounting position. |
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| The Turntable opened. The table (right) is mounted using a single screw through the center. |
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| Be careful when you open up the turntable. There are five little wheels/bearings that can fall out of the base and get lost if you're not paying attention. |
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| This is probably the most expensive part in the turntable- a 6003RS bearing! |
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| Cut the battery leads from the terminals, strip, and solder them to the solar cell leads. I put heat shrink tubing on them to prevent shorts and used a screw to hold the wires down inside the base. |
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| Underside of the turntable base. I threw away the battery cover and ran the wires from the solar cell into the turntable base through the battery cover latch hole. |
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| Completed assembly, ready to go on the window sill. |
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| Another view of the completed assembly. |
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| Yet another view of the completed assembly. |
