LEDs can now be tiny. I mean, hugely tiny. Surface-mount LEDs can be less than a millimetre across.
It is, I believe, not beyond the wit of man to encapsulate such an LED in a little blob of transparent silicone, along with a teeny coil of wire connected between the LED's anode and cathode.
A hundred or so of these potted LEDs can now be placed in a snowglobe. "Why?" I hear you ask. Well, the base of the snowglobe contains a larger coil, connected to an oscillator.
When you shake the snowglobe, the potted LEDs (which, thanks to the silicone, are almost neutrally bouyant) swirl around snowily. As they tumble, their little coils sporadically pick up the field emitted from the base, causing them to twinkle twinkishly.
And that is all.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 28 2017 Wireless Electricity Transmission Circuit http://www.instruct...ansmission-circuit/Demonstration of the principle [Wrongfellow, Dec 29 2017] Cute.-- xenzag, Dec 28 2017 Tawdry, garish, cheap, lacking in taste or refinement.
Just like your wife, really.-- 8th of 7, Dec 28 2017 You just like my wife? I shall be sure to let her know.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 28 2017 Indeed, she exhibits in superabundence those qualities of dispassionate, ruthless brutality and relentless logic that would make her Assimilation into a soulless, evil hegemonizing swarm completely seamless.
Presumably she was well aware that the carol singer with the crutch couldn't run away as fast as the others because it was partially sighted, and just continued to bombard it with rotten fruit because it was an easy target ?
Fearsome throw she's got, too ...-- 8th of 7, Dec 28 2017 Ah - if I'd known that was you I wouldn't have asked her to take the fruit out of the tin first.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 28 2017 I like it and think they should make them.-- beanangel, Dec 28 2017 A quick check with RS components says that surface-mount green or red LEDs (not the smallest, but about 1mm across) can be bought for about 2.7 pence each.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 29 2017 This approach can be made to work [link] although I'd consider adding a capacitor too, so the thing runs at a known resonant frequency.
However - your coils will have to be very small so they don't dwarf the LEDs. This means they won't intercept a lot of magnetic flux, so you'll need a very powerful transmitter to light them.
(Incidentally, the coils will also re-radiate at half the energising frequency, which could cause them to set off some designs of handheld "bug detector". You could see this as a feature.)-- Wrongfellow, Dec 29 2017 Hmm. Well, I'm imagining these little twinklers rolling off a production line by the million, overseen by diligent Malaysian pre-teens, so I'm sure that adding the necessary widgetry won't be a problem. Regarding efficiency, they only need to twinkle now and then, so perhaps we'll be OK.
I did originally consider another option: make the snowglobe liquid slightly conductive, and apply a few tens of volts across it. Let the LEDs' terminals stick out of the silicone blob, and they'll get volts whenever they happen to be lying in the right orientation.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 29 2017 //lying in the right orientation// My lies are always in the right orientation.-- xenzag, Dec 29 2017 Blue and white LEDs are basically UV LEDs with a phosphor, so you could make the whole thing simpler by sticking UV LEDs in the base and having chunks of phosphor float around.-- mitxela, Dec 29 2017 That is not an entirely stupid idea, [mixt].-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 29 2017 // What lies ahead ? //
"A long, dark, lonely downhill road, with a pine box and six feet of cold earth at the end of it."-- 8th of 7, Dec 29 2017 I'd originally imagined that the now-and-then twinkliness would be provided by the LEDs rotating as they moved around; they'll only light when the axis of the coil is pointed roughly towards the transmitter.
If they're going to be manufactured by the millions, though, they're going to have a certain amount of variation in their natural resonant frequency, and this could be exploited by slowly sweeping the frequency of the transmitter, adding an extra degree of now-and- thenniness to the idea.-- Wrongfellow, Dec 29 2017 I like this despite my belief it's some kind of contraceptive device.-- po, Dec 29 2017 Listen, [po], just quit trying to out-weird us, OK ?-- 8th of 7, Dec 29 2017 //I like this despite my belief it's some kind of contraceptive device// It would undoubtedly work as such.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 29 2017 If you fitted this to a headband, could you run around with it on top of your head? You should do this and post the photographs to demonstrate your committment to the idea? I think this is needed. Who else agrees with me? Failure to comply may result in unplanned children being born.-- xenzag, Dec 29 2017 [xen], dear, you need to take another one of the green capsules. I said: ENCORE UN CAPSULE VER... no, I meant orally.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 29 2017 It's certainly true that wearing a snowglobe on your head can have a contraceptive effect.-- Wrongfellow, Dec 29 2017 random, halfbakery