Fidget Spinner Generator | English
Channel: IISER Pune Science Activity Centre
Date: 2017-08-21

Fidget spinners are toys that have gained popularity these days as they spin for a very long time and stay balanced while spinning. There are different kinds of fidget spinners available in the market. Students play hours with these beautiful spinning toys. To make the toy spin, students hold the central caps which cover the bearings and give a push to one of the arms.
Today we will make an innovative electricity generator by using fidget spinner. To design the generator, we need 
1. A fidget spinner
2. Neodymium magnets
3. Thin insulated copper wire
4. LED’s
5. Cutters
6. Wooden board

The key thing of this spinner is the ball bearing at the centre of the toy. The process to design this is very simple. These are the strong magnets which can be found in the shops where scientific material is available.

• Stick one disk neodymium magnet on one side of each arm of the fidget spinner using glue.
• Be sure that the magnets are attached at the centre of each arm of the spinner.
• To make the coil, wind insulated copper wire on a cylindrical box or PVC pipe. Wind the wire proximately 1000 times to make the coil that looks like this.
• Keep both ends of the wire uncoiled to serve as leads.  Tie this coil at several places to prevent it from unwinding. Wind the wires such that the windings do not open. Scrape off the insulation at the ends of two leads of the coil. Carefully check if the insulation is removed completely.  Now join the LED to the coil. Now your coil and LED assembly is ready. 
• Now place the fidget spinner on the bottle cap to get some height and keep the coil LED assembly underneath the magnet. Keep the gap between the magnet and the copper coil minimum.
• When you spin the magnets attached to fidget spinner above the coil then you see the LED glow.
• Once you have got one coil assembly to work, make four such coils and attach to the LED. Make sure that the magnets attached to the spinner do not touch the coil. When you spin the magnets above the coils then you can see all the LEDs glowing.
You can spin the toy in the dark to see this beautiful effect.
• Mount all four coil – LED assemblies on a wooden board. Fix bottle cap on the Centre of the wooden board.  Stick plastic cap of spinner to the bottle cap and spin the fidget spinner very fast. When you spin magnets above the coil then you will see all four LEDs glowing.
• According to Faraday’s law, a changing magnetic field through a coil of wire must induce an electromotive force (emf) in the coil which in turn causes current to flow. The law describing induced emf is named after the British scientist Michael Faraday.
So friends play with your fidget spinner and make it do more things than just spinning!

Team: Ashok Rupner, Apurva Barve, Shanti Pise, Prachi Pasalkar, Shilpa Jain