The solar powered Annoy-o-tron 2000

This one surprised me as it was coming to life...

It all started because I wanted to make a new solar-powered desk ornament kinda thing. I was a little unsure about what the end result should be but I started by building a solid base from soldering a couple of capacitors to some wire rings. I really like the Symmet I had made  as I found the form very simple and beautiful.

 I decided to make a positive and a negative ring this time. I liked the way it stood so I continued building on that shape. I created a central Spire looking thing that was unconnected so as not to confuse the "live" rings I had. The rest of the structure is glued under the Capacitors.

I really like using guitar wire in my creations (Like this one). Solar-powered ones especially since they tend to amplify whatever small movement you can get from the sun. I live in Canada and the sun is not that reliable over here... 

At that point, I decided that I wanted to make this for a friend who is an avid musician and so very sensitive to sounds in his environment. After a few tests, I found out that if I stuck a button vibrating motor to the end of a long-ish piece of string I could get it to vibrate and bounce around if it was resting on a solid thing. Sounds a bit complicated for no reason but that's what happens late at night. It produced a weird, low, unreliable humm that was sure to make him crazy. Only on sunny days, of course.

So I kept building the frame up and created a resting spot to hang the twisted string from. I then found a good way to connect the pieces of my basic Miller engine to the frame rings and one little drop of hot glue later, the whole thing was done.

This is, by far, the project with the smallest amount of hot glue I have ever produced.

I captured some video during the day, at work and then one of the wires came loose so I brought it back home. I re-soldered the wire and added a little piece of guitar string to try and get it to be a tiny bit louder. It worked.