Inside a water-ripple projector
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 ต.ค. 2024
- A look inside a typical tungsten lamp based water-ripple projector.
This is a very generic Chinese clone style unit that lacks proper optical efficiency.
It's designed to operate with a high output 12V 100W narrow beam lamp, but the high output lamps like that have a very short lifespan of around 50 hours. Using a lower power lamp or long-life lamp results in a much longer run time between lamp changes, but at the cost of intensity.
Nowadays these projectors tend to use LED based light sources. The ripple mechanism remains very similar between larger units like this. Sometimes with a dichroic glass colour wheel that can operate independently or in conjunction with one of the ripple disks.
The visual effect that these units produce is very subtle and soothing. Like a reflection from a pool or the sea.
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It never ceases to amaze me how jankey and basic the insides of these effects are. a couple of geared motors and some bathroom window glass - really!? Thanks for sharing Clive.
When I was on molly, I noticed that each dot reflected off of a disco ball projected really tiny shadows in the shape of the bulb's filament if you look really close and focus on one dot. Most of the old projector based f/x devices are like that.
When I was in college I bought a laser effect light at Spencer's for $200 that was basically a tiny LED glued to the diaphragm of an electromagnetic voice coil from a speaker, and a rotating angled piece of mirror.
By the time my roommate and I came down from our trip we had built a dozen replicas using parts we bought at radio shack for about $30 and later we sold them to other dead heads at our school.
@@PhilLesh69 When you focus the sun through a magnifying glass, you get a circle, but if in some alternate universe, the sun were shaped like a square, you would get a tiny square. Same phenomenon as a camera obscura. Physics!
When I was a kid I copied (batteries an bike lamp and salvaged motor) a colour wheel disco light my brother had hired - a metal wheel with coloured gel film in holes cut in it, rotated in front of a bright spot. This was mid 70s. My version used cardboard and Quality Street wrappers and the motor from a Scalextric car.
@@KurtRichterCISSP - When _I_ focus the sun through a magnifying glass, I get arrested for arson.
I saw the other day what I thought was light reflecting off a pool, although I knew that there was no pool anywhere near there. Turned out to be the sun reflecting off of large sheets of plastic curtains. It was a very convincing, although unintentional, effect.
I made one of these years ago with a modified 1950's slide projector microwave turntable motor, and cutting circles out of a broken shower door. 20 years, and it still works!
Nice set of lamps, this and the previous fiber optic light. Interesting designs, this one really could do with a more focused LED-makeover :)
The instant the top came off, my first thought was that it looked very much like a PAPI (precision approach path indicator--an airfield's visual glide slope indicator for aircraft approaches you'll generally see as two sets of two red circular lights on the left side of a runway [it's red because you're below the glide slope; all four lenses are half red/white and angled slightly differently so the pilot sees them change progressively from all white {too high} to all red {too low} with the sweet spot showing two white and two red]).
"Red over white, you're alright. Red over red, you're dead," as an aircraft mechanic I knew used to say. Good to know if the pilot ever dies, I guess? The other bit of trivia I got from him was, key the mike five(?) times on 121.5 to turn on the runway lights. Never had occasion to use either; hopefully won't?
Years ago I got caught out whilst on an Emirates flight into LHR. I was enjoying the forward looking camera up until I realised that I could see 4 red lights.
It wasn't until several hours later that my brain kicked in and I remembered that the camera was located quite a bit lower than the pilots’ eye level...
@@idjtoal lmao 121.5 is the emergency use freq, wouldn't want to key that
@@ColHogan-zg2pc Right, but that's the point though? Runway lights aren't on, maybe it's 3 AM, so there's a system to pick up that signal if anyone needs it. Doing it randomly when you're driving past for chuckles, okay, obviously not that.
and if you can see all green, that is the light shining through the grass and you are VERY low...
I can see all kinds of hacks for this, everyone else is saying LED, but that would leave a huge chunk of the enclosure empty... I could see adding a second set of motors and disks, but with various other lighting effects (colors, patterns...). Psychedelic water ripples! 😁
@Les Excellent point about the focal points, I hadn't considered that. I suppose an RGBW LED could be used to make the same effect as color wheels, but what fun would that be?
I've seen the water ripple effect and color wheel lights, but not combined. That would have been too cool to make it to my little area!
How did early Pink Floyd do it, some kind of oil floating on water?
With LED you could use that space to put a raspberry or ESP8266 with WLED app, which would be quite cool
@@charleslambert3368 I think they used LSD.
That's how Syd lost his marbles.
@@charleslambert3368 oil film lighting. It's a really old school psychedelic effect, and I'm hoping Clive will do a video on it eventually.
In my work (in the TV/film industry), typically we'd use a sheet of mylar loose on a frame (like a flag) and bounce an HMI off of it while a grip gently manipulated the mylar... ahh, the good old days when things would catch fire a lot... In fact, in the '90's I directed a British Telecom ad you might have seen where we used that effect on a runner. Clive - can I make a request? Make your videos longer, please. I find your voice very soothing late at night and your content interesting, fun and relaxing.
A good example of the shaken mylar is the Rick Astley Rick-roll video.
This is also how waves and other randomly moving materials are made in 3D/games.
You combine multiple of these random noise textures and let them slide over eachother in different directions and add/subtract them together
Reminds me of the low budget disco gear we sold at Maplin circa 1997. We had a stage display made from Trilite with all the moving PAR lamps which were on 9 hours a day - week after week. Every year we had to replace the moving lamps which had stopped moving. When we opened them up, the insides would be full of iron filings where the mechanisms once were.
I’ve come across tons and tons of incredible quality American made DJ and show lighting and associated equipment. One of the industrial scrap yards I go to a few times a week. We have a lot of massive churches around town. Thousands of folks. So when they clean out their storage there’s no telling what kinds of ridiculous stuff they throw away.
Amazing the effect of a simple reflective or transmissive moving material. We have a "magicoal" electric heater which has some convection fans that reflect a couple of bulbs onto a surface to look like flames, amazingly real looking. Love your video's Merry Christmas and I hope your New Year is better than the last year ( from New Zealand ) :)
It reminds me of those aluminum foil rotating rotisserie fireplaces, complete with fake logs.
the fan noise was noticeable, but is a shame so much light is lost. A good high power LED would make much more light, a possible project?
I was surprised to see that it wasn't an ELC 250W/24v lamp in it. I also wonder if you'd have better results using the "coolfit" (I think that's a Sylvania trade name) MR16 Lamps which are designed to not allow light out the back of the reflector? Thanks for another interesting teardown :)
I thought the majority of the light that passes through the reflector was supposed to be infra red.
Another worthy lamp is Osram optical types, they have a polished aluminium reflector.
Keep up the lighting and entertainment industry based videos Clive.
That's an awesome effect, would still be very good to have today in most places.
Reminds me of those "Liquid light shows" they used to do with an overhead projector, a glass dish and food colouring. Those were the days.
I have subscribed to your channel for quite a while now and I just want to say I enjoy listening to you talk. You have a very calm and soothing voice. Love your channel. Would love to hear you do some audio books or podcasts. Keep up the great work. Have a great day.
these are my fave light type out of them all...im so glad thay are cheep ish now...as always love the vids keep it up you inspier me
Take it apart? I expected "Let's take it to bits".
I always find these devices fascinating and I appreciate the teardowns you do with them.
The Fiber Optic lighter for example - I looked up stuff that this is used for because I had no clue where stuff like this is used.
Always gives a nice understanding and appreciation for effects and such things outside of the own home.
What an interesting gizmo! I've never seen such an apparatus!
Remember using an old Rank projection lantern that used a fairly similar principle. There was a massive rotating patterned glass disk rotating, with interchangeable gels, or a special rotating disk for clouds. I remember in a production of Orpheus in the Underworld, using the cloud effect, and then changing the disk assembly and gels to make stylised fire effect between acts. The local paper commented of the "wonderful use of back projection" it would have been wonderful but I was using front projection on a solid "cyc".
Always loved the tubular ripple projectors that WL supplied
Big Clive makes me feel like I'm really dumb, because I understand nothing of the things he explains. But his voice gives a "...that's okay, you're still appreciated" vibe.
Happy new year, BigClive! May your new year be full of happiness, health, prosperity and many satisfying LEDs.
Back when I was about forteen I found a very similar one that had been disposed and took it home to take it apart for pure curiosity. They haven't changed much since back then.
It turned out it was very easy to repair and I took it back to the business that threw it away. They were happy that I saved them a chunk of change and then asked if I could fix their calculator. It was the first time I came across a Commodore calculator. 😄
I used to replace SO MANY of those effects light globes when I was in the industry. Some of the lights we used had a spinning disc filled with coloured oil and water to achieve a similar effect.
Oil wheel projectors.
I wonder what would it look like with light source from one of those "zoomable" led flashlights. Including the zoom-focus lens. I presume it would be enough juice from fan power line. Some buck stepdown converter or simply resistor divider...
Light could be more focused trough and between el.motors. Also, brightness adjustable in steps from the flashlight.
P.s. just saw that there are already few comments about LED light source :-)
Early 3D video games also loved to use this effect for water textures, with sliding layers instead of rotating ones.
Keep up the good work, enjoy them very much.... Wishing you a happy new year with good health and prosperity ! Be safe !
I've gotten to the point that when I think about the inner workings of various electronic devices, I start thinking about you, Clive.
All you guys here in 'CHAT' really interest me & just simply, all your skills alone are immense. I was just reading comments and i couldnt believe the amount of technical info about ....Basicly...a light!! Ha ha. And real in depth knowlege also, i just find it fantastic, & im jealous....I wanna piece of the action? lol
Is it just my imagination, or were there also some ripple-projectors that had some kind of oil-film inside to create the ripples?
I always wondered how they work.
The oil units were possible oil wheel projectors that created psychedelic coloured moving blobs.
@@bigclivedotcom The Pink Floyd used oil wheel projectors in the 60's.
That's why Syd lost his marbles.
@@travisash8180 If that's the case they should be banned. Stupid boy.
@@travisash8180 he was supposed to look at the oil, not smoke it
Cinemas here had those oil projectors
Clive what if you replaced the lamp with single color LEDs or or one of the auto color changing RBG types?
Have a Happy New Year.
It would have to be a very directional LED so single colour.
Add a wee voltage divider circuit in there and you could have the two motors travelling at different speeds, so the patterns wouldn't repeat every revolution. Set them at a suitableenharmonic ratio and the pattern might not repeat for ages.
They're synchronous motors, so are locked to mains frequency.
reminds me of my mums 'electric fire' from the 70's, she was s annoyed when i broke the flame effect, but i needed the lens for a project :)
Makes me remember the 2000s and my childhood, when all those effects were using either halogen or discharge lamps (For the moving heads).
Too bad I didn't go to parties and didn't purchase any lights at the time (Perhaps I was too young to go to parties and as far as buying such lights went, I definitely couldn't have afforded it and my parents wouldn't have agreed either).
But I remember having seen so many things in catalogues that simply don't exist anymore nowadays...
looks like someone is missing a piece of their shower cabinet for those platters lol.
*thank you it's very interesting 👍👋❤️*
I'm surprised they even used two motors in a cheapo knockoff. I half expected a rubber band or plastic gears between the rotating plates.
2 off the shelf motors likely were cheaper than arranging for the one bespoke shaft and pulley. Then cut cost by removing the condenser lens that should be in front of the lamp, to focus the beam down to a more concentrated form, focussed to a point just in front or behind the glass sheets, so as to get more light output. They missed out on a cost cutting trick though, as often the transformer used is an autotransformer, with one section being the thick 12VAC lamp winding, and then the rest being a 208VAC winding to cut copper cost. You can go further and use the autotransformer with a second tap at 36VAC, making use of even cheaper microwave oven turntable motors, which are in general wound for 36VAC use, as this saves copper cost in the coils.
Yes they do not have a direction of rotation, but in this application that means your pattern will be more random, and the transformer can be much lower cost as well, plus the 110VAC version is just a different transformer used in the box, saving money in only having a single part to convert, or adding the 115VAC tap to it as well and making it universal, just choose which CCA wire winding you want to use. Full bridge rectifier, could have saved 1.5c there, and used a single diode and a recycled ewaste capacitor instead.
@@SeanBZA I suspect the pattern would look rather poor if the discs are rotating in opposite directions, so non-directional motors might not be an option.
When you stopped the two discs, I got a freaky waterfall effect illusion, where they appeared to counter-rotate.
Yea, same here! :)
A 12V 100W lamp!?!?!? Holy hell, that must run hot! I have a few 12V halogen lamps and a few LED replacements, and the incandescent halogen lamps run untouchably hot. I shudder to imagine how hot a 100W lamp in the same package can get.
Water ripples are great that lamp 🔦 must get hot hot😅 thankyou for showing me the light learnt alot soothing voice 🤟
It’s better than what I used when I was a kid I used clear Tupperware container filled with a little bit of water balanced on some books with torch underneath and old damaged piece of Blue microfiche over front of torch and a fan aimed at water to try and make a ripple effect to try and make my bedroom feel like it was Underwater.
"its a nice effect.. lets take a look at the unit then, take it apart and see whats inside." - Big Clive 2021
I felt that..
Thank you for this year and for being a bright beacon of light in the dark and I´ll see you in the next year!
Happy New Year! Lets hope 2022 will be like soldering with flux! :)
2021 was lead-free solder, no doubt about that.
Back in the middle 1970s my parents took us to a cinema in central London. While the audience was getting seated and waiting for the film to start they treated us to a projection of bubbles on the main screen. At the age of five or so I thought it very pretty. I can imagine how it was done - a compressed air line going into a container of washing-up liquid solution, the bubbles spreading across a glass screen with a light behind it, and a mirror and lens to get the image to the screen. It was fashionable in those days, but I'm pretty sure it has completely gone out. I wonder if any of those devices have survived?
Oil wheel projector?
Syd used to have one.
It reminded him of the old days, when he had his marbles.
When he died it was sold.
Used an old ex-MOD slide projector with a TicTacs box and baby oil to do this.
Bit of tube for aquarium air system to blow bubles and it worked well.
@@keithsquawk That sounds plausible for what I remember on the screen.
Apart from the lower quality and durability of materials and components of Chinese clones, I would almost always also have problems with their proper control. When I would load their profile into the program, usually either half of the listed effects wouldn't work, or the addresses would be completely mixed up (effect button label mismatch), causing me to have to try out each effect button before some event starts, to see what each one actually does. That is why they cost three times less than those original light machines.
Thankyou for your content. Happy new year
Nice way to make your neighbours think you have a swimming pool by projecting the pattern on the back of your house at night.
Look forward to your follow up video where you replace the lamp with a Cree LED.....
In the realm of those old Optikinetics projectors and those disc cartridges, and if you had the money for the supplementary motorised rotating prisms you got the most out of it. Happy days.
I had some bathroom tiles that gave a similar effect when a light was shined on them at a certain angle. They had a slightly undulated surface with some sort of transparent coating on it.
Clive, it just wonders me how a LED cob would work in this light. I've seen where people have replaced the HID bulb in a video projector with an LED, and get very good results. I have one I'm going to experiment with this way to see how it functions. It requires a separate power source for the led, as the HID is high voltage, but for less than 10% of the cost of the HID bulb it would be worth it if it can work.
COB (Chip on Board) is a bad choice for anything requiring focus. What you want is the smallest source area, preferably a single LED, that can provide the Lumens you need. Something like a Cree XM-L or XM-L2 can deliver about 1000Lm from a point-like source.
Interesting 🧐 Effects!!! Nifty Guts Too!!! Nice 😊 Fan Hack Too!!!
The teacher at my school who was in charge of theatre technical stuff came back from an auction (Stage Electrics?) with a totally different ripple effect unit. A steel box about 60cm long, it had a motorised drum perforated with ripple shapes, and a long linear tungsten lamp behind. Two 15A plugs (motor and lamp - so that could be dimmed). Worked rather well as an effect. No make on it - typical ex-hire respray.
Drum ripple. Sometimes with rippled glass in front. They got VERY hot in use.
I wonder if you could make the effect even more convincing by adding, say, a triangular disk array so that it has a more chaotic/less directional look
Cheap means modable though. :) There are some components like the spinning disks and the lens. See the comments already mention plenty of suggestions. I'd add a thin blue filter somewhere as well. Perhaps color the disks themselves. Blue water.
Put the chanting buddha flower also inside and you have a 'meditation machine'. :)
I have one of these but Its actually just an open top fishtank with an LED light bar
Presumably something like this was used when filiming Stargate SG1 for illuminating the gateroom when the gate was active.
wasn't wearing my glasses. thought the title said "wear nipple protectors"
And when you stopped the motors I was looking in the middle and things carried on moving. Odd. 😋👍
You’d think they could at least add a little coloured slide, green and blue shapes perhaps, in front of the lamp, to add a little extra interest. A well place concave lens may aid the efficiency?
If the two motors were tuned to turn at different rates, that off-centre disc would allow for increased subtle randomness in the ripple pattern, no?
I think Carlos Santana had a guy with an overhead projector and two sheets of transparency gels with oil and food coloring pressed between them that he would manually move around to create crazy trippy visuals on a giant screen over the band, timed to the rhythm of the music.
Tons of opportunity for "creative modification" there! Worth losing the tungsten halide lamp, and replacing with a 1W warm white LED just behind the two disks? Seems a very quick way of upping the luminous efficiency (and of course there's the potential of an RGB COB array . . . . .) Very nice though!
A thin polished Aluminium tub, would work wonders to get more light out the front!
I feel the effect would look even better if the glass spun in opposite direction to each other and one spun slightly quicker than tother creating a more random pattern.
As it is now, I perceived it as tumbling with the ripple underneath going up and the top going down. I also started to see a regular pattern.
I like converting these into oil wheel lamps
Put a piece of red acetate in front of it and then you'll have a raspberry ripple projector.
Like the early ProBeam units from Meteor, the projector lamp was good for about 75 hours, which is a PITA when the fixture is mounted in a non easily accessible.
With the ability to have a auto color changer, the fixture would be much better.
It would be interesting to see what affect changing the direction that the discs spin had on the overall pattern
I had the thought that you might try putting a convex lens in front of the lamp to get more light through the aperture, but that would make for an apparently large light source. The problem is that the less the light source looks like a point source, the less pronounced the ripples will be. ie: if you had a tiny, but very bright arc lamp in there, the ripples would look fantastic (ignoring the heat considerations for now)
Oh for the days of the disco's back in the 70's I don't know which was best the light show or the music.
Saw Pink Floyd in the 90's their light show was mind blowing so no wonder us old boys have got eyes like pee holes in the snow or was that something do with LSD I wonder.
Begging for a 20w CMH MR16 for the win 😎
I have a table top fiberoptic Christmas tree which has a colored disc infront of a 6v, 5w lamp. I used to wonder how the tree always had the same ripple pattern until I opened the base to change the burnt out lamp 😁
Looks to be at least 20 years old. Any idea when it was made?
Probably at least that long ago.
I'm sure you could easily upgrade the light with led and better speed controlled motors. Also make the box half the size.
Time to Convert it or Pervert it to LED ! Always remember Test IT, Before You Molest IT !!!!.I have a set of color changing LED outside lights ,solar with only a single disc .Good effect !
probably originally an A1/231 projector lamp, these were designed to give an optimum beam size for 8mm and 9.5mm cine film, so the optics only need to be simple, its why dichroics and gobos in 100W disco lights using A1/231 lamps only need to be sized 10mm or less, the bigger A1/259 250W 24V ELC lamp was similarly for 16mm cine gates.
I remember these kind of effects being advertised in catalogues for lighting gear over 20 years ago.
They cost a pretty penny too, back then! Everything did! But then i was barely 12 years old, and everyhing seemed to be expensive.
Ah youth, when a quid as a lot and a day was long. Nowadays I blink and I'm nursing another new years hangover.
Wonder how hard it is to cut pieces of glass like that? Or would it be easier to cast, maybe in resin?
I got a glazing company to cut me some disks of patterned glass and they did it right there and then no problem
What voltage is the transformer? If it's 12V, give or take a couple of volts, then how about changing the halogen for a retrofit LED lamp, or would the different beam mess up the effect?
Happy hogmanay, Clive.
I would get dry markers and colour the glass lenses for added chill!
Good Thursday morning to you sir
Replace the MR16 with an LED version.
Maybe a cool white or a 8500K version to give a more watery blue effect.
The unit will run even cooler.
I've got an old Projector similar to this. But it's got a 4 Color Dichroic Color Wheel and is focusable. Not certain about the voltage inside, think it's all 230V
Hey there - maybe you could add a lens just after the lamp so that more light goes through the useful section of the discs? Maybe just try it with a magnifying glass you have around? or one lens right on the lamp followed by another further on to make it go through the discs in a beam shape
i was thinking of a tube with a reflective inside surface.
@@vsvnrg3263 A collimator?
@@whitesapphire5865 , i had to look that word up. i was thinking more along the lines of a toilet roll with tin foil in it or a piece of stainless steel. but yes, a collimator will do nicely.
Such a collimator will produce a lot of scattering, which will show up as a broad halo around the center spot. Better optics would be a parabolic reflector, elliptical reflector, or total internal reflection optics. (All of which make interesting reads.)
Woah! Did anybody else experience that weird effect when Clive switched the motors off, the optical illusion that look like everything was still moving? Maybe that was just me? Should I go see somebody about this?
When they stopped I got the illusion they started turning backwards very very slowly.
Like looking out of the window on a stopped train and feeling like it's slowly moving backwards
@@jamesbennettmusic Or rivers flowing uphill after a few hours of hiking in the mountains.
That was the most, v0.85 back yard beta hack, turned into an "product" of sorts I've seen 😂 delightfully jank!
We always run 15v 150w lamps in anything that had the 12v 100w. Lasts forever then
Off centre? I thought that was a cleaver design to add some more variation to the display. I'm sticking with my analysis :)
Thanks from Texas Clive. A good LED upgrade project video maybe? Stuff in a COB & a Big Clive home made LED driver board. from JLC PCB none the less. Just a thought. (Do you actually say that in Scotland?)
Are they not deliberately off-center to give a bit more movement to the effect?
I think it's just sloppy manufacturing.
So what's next for it? a mr16 rgb led bulb maybe?
If you are casting or blowing glass, then doing it at scale: that ellipse is pretty reasonable. You would have to look more closely but are each of those glass discs completely flat and even thickness (by a pair of callipers or exceeding 1.0mm in thickness variation)?
I don't have access to that light at the moment. Most others I've seen used disks cut from patterned glass, but modern ones use a custom moulded plastic lens disk.
@@bigclivedotcom If these discs are cast in a hot shop, they could inherently be off from a perfect circle simply by human hand. It takes a lot of precision make congruent blown objects unless you have mold that you can blow into (letting a bubble of hot glass fill a negative space and your only variance is how much glass enters the mold). Generally grinding takes time and is costly compared steal molds and putting away hot glass in the general form (it cannot stay in the steal mold and will deform (slightly) as it cools)
Hey! I really love this effect. Where can I buy one? :D
Keep up the good work
Search for water ripple projector. You may find one from a local supplier.
Looks like a job for Elliptical Optics to me. Replace that lamp with a small car Projector Headlamp. Then replace the HID bulb in the projector lamp with an LED upgrade. Bigclive could make a great segment about how elliptical optics work.
A nice effect, although difficult to match the beauty of real water caustics.
Extremely difficult. Always hard to get anything that looks non-deterministic from simple mechanisms.
I always believed that if you touch those lamps glass it will become yellow due to the grease and heat. Is it true?
You don't want to touch any bulb that gets hot because the oils from your skin heat up the glass in an irregular manner. This causes it to expand and break. (it makes hot spots on the glass)
Oil on the globe of quartz lamps will cause devitrification and potential failure.
I'm surprised that you didn't turn it into an very much more efficient LED based projector. ;-)