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Inside a tungsten moonflower disco light.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ก.ย. 2020
- A look inside a common retro disco light, and how it uses a single lamp to generate lots of sharp beams of light that can either be static as in this unit, or rotate to the beat.
Although very inefficient, these simple lights put out lots of very sharp beams of light, so they dominated the cheaper end of the disco market for decades.
I was a bit under the weather while recording this video, so I may sound a bit hoarse.
I meant to say "Safety Extra Low Voltage Equivalent" (SELV-equiv) when I described the electronic halogen transformer. (Also known as Separated Extra Low Voltage Equivalent.)
The simplest way to understand the operation of this effect is to imagine that from various positions in the room, looking through the lens will show a reflection of the lamp's filament in one of the many small mirrors. (Don't actually look directly into high intensity light beams though.)
The reference to the capacitor stopping the power supply from blowing up is the tendency of the circuitry to become more sensitive to mains transients when hot. Extra external filtering was often added for electrical noise reduction to limit emitted noise and also try and reduce the risk of power supply failure.
If you enjoy these videos you can help support the channel with a dollar for coffee, cookies and random gadgets for disassembly at:-
www.bigclive.co...
This also keeps the channel independent of TH-cam's advertising algorithms allowing it to be a bit more dangerous and naughty.
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It never ceases to amaze me how you can keep your commentary going through long continuous takes and even when you’re under the weather no less, I can barely get through a pre-scripted sentence without screwing something up!
Stay safe, don’t overdo it.
It took a while to get to that fluid speech point.
The commentary is recorded in post, during edit?
@@michaelturner4457 it's all done live. Usually in a single take.
@@bigclivedotcom That's great to know. Because I think many popular TH-camrs may record their commentary during post-production, so they can try to get it perfect.
Michael Turner I don’t mean this as a bad thing towards Clive, but I don’t think he aims for videos to be ‘perfect’. He puts out videos that get the job done, and as long as it comes across properly, with no glaring errors or omissions, then that’s plenty good enough.
He's Alive. Good to see you back
Rumours of Clive's demise have been greatly exaggerated.
I love 80's club lighting.... and so simple inside yet so clever. Never noticed the "filament" pattern but then again who saw them without a filter of alcohol
He's D.I.S.C.O.
He's Descriptive
He's Informative
He's Softly spoken
He's Cool beardy
He's Oooh Oooh Ooohver there on the Isle of Man.
Keep up the good work Clive.
@mark robertson wait what
cute lol
you inadvertently discovered how that unit does its movements.
every time the bass hits, the lens rattles XD
... and the thing just falls apart, eventually.
SELV, Spectacularly Eliminating LEDs Violently.
I'm so happy when you make old disco light video's
I used to repair terrible disco lights for a living at a shop in Vancouver years ago. We got so many of these through, although usually with motors. It almost got to be a joke about how everything we got was just a type of moonflower. Moving-mirror fixture? Single-beam fancy moonflower. One of my co-workers ended up mounting a unit very much like the one in the video into a broken moving-head fixture for a DMX controllable moonflower. Still, not the worst light we worked on. That dubious honor went to a moving mirror spotlight style fixture that was... repair-proof. They just used whatever parts were cheap at the time and then modified the firmware to accommodate it. So two fixtures, same model, manufactured a month apart, did not have interchangeable stepper motors or EEPROMs.
Very interested in a video about the power supply! Glad to see you back and well
I have that exact mini socket set - and it’s the first tool purchase I’ve made where I’ve invested a bit more for a quality product. It genuinely fills me with joy to have such a well designed product, with a surprisingly useful/not flimsy storage case
Very interesting video Clive, thanks for the nice teardown.
The least-accessible nut on the screws the PS to the case can often be held stationary by inserting a flat-blade screwdriver (or similar) between a single face of the nut and the face of the shell (or wall) adjacent running parallel to the screw.
Isn't a light you can only have on for 15 minutes before it starts destroying itself a design flaw?
Ha Ha, like someone is going to sit and turn it off every 15 minute, wait 5 minutes turn it on and repeat. Never gonna happen! =)
Let's just say I didn't hear you say focus at about @5:00 🤣
I didn't plan to say it in a way that sounded quite so rude.
I knew I wasn't the only one that heard that 😅
I thought it was funny as hell.
I'm wondering about the "pair o'bollock" reflector
It sounded intentional, in Clive’s usual risqué way of annunciating
The parabolic reflector covered in square mirrors reminds me of Lauri and Anni Vuohensilta of the Hydraulic Press Channel doing the same with a satellite-dish to make a giant solar cooker.
I'll have to look for that.
@@bigclivedotcom th-cam.com/video/sn89Zg0k19U/w-d-xo.html Except that (very typically) they describe it not as a solar cooker but a "solar powered DEATH RAY!"
@@bigclivedotcom Also done on a large scale by This Old Tony:
th-cam.com/video/bPoOvy3elD8/w-d-xo.html
@@COBARHORSE1 Solar cooking also done by Desertphile, with cats included.
Yes, *that* Desertphile. *GRAVITY!!!*
th-cam.com/video/xWV1eL9Ifcg/w-d-xo.html
I miss the "light organs" that was used in the 80's. The ones with different colours controlled by the frequency spectrum of the music.
Got hold of a schematic and component list when I was around 12 and started to build in the electronic class at school... For some reason the teacher and my dad didn't think it was a good idea :-(
What could possible gone wrong? Only involved 230 V, triacs, transformer (to isolate from stereo signal) and a beginner in electronics....
Yes I used to make lots of those as a kid.
I have a few of these I made back in the 70's 3 channel and 4 .
you land across the room from where it went in a hand and out feet/leg and didn't do it again, because you gained respect of the force electrical power provides from then forward?
been there done that, leyden jars, car ignition coil, D-shaft motor with points and condenser, diode strings......in hand and out leg, with multiple jumps through cheap old folding tv tray, with metal legs and rim.
it gave me a whole new respect of high voltage and current electricity, but also made me numb and dull to 120V shocks(USA)... did new construction residential electric for a while and many changes/rewires for all the years before and after, I often just wire live, yep been zapped many hundreds of times, partially lit up light bulbs through fingers...
I’ve been looking for one of those for awhile, I got my hands on a 1972 Morse Electrophonic stereo that has one built in.
I built one of those when I was 15 or so, for a school electronics course project. As I recall, I was the only one in class who completely finished, including finishing the case.
In my Acme Winner Mirror head scanner I disconnected the 24v projector lamp and wired in a 240v GU10 fitting with an LED lamp in place as they are the same diameter it fitted in nicely at the cost of reduced brightness but benefits massively on nearly zero heat and no duty cycle. It works for me in the home but would be crap in a large venue but the colours and shapes are still as vibrant and the unit doesnt seem to care about not having a 24v bulb inside, maybe it has a dummy load resistor somewhere for the power supply to be happy I dont know. I do have a moonflower effect that uses 12v capsule tungsten bulbs, its a long barrel shape with a motor and the same mirrors in it, however I took apart an older unit that had 8 dichroic mirrors in it and glass glued them over some mirrors to try and at least create some colour. As you said, they dont work greatly as reflected light but some of the 'spots' do have at least some colour to them. My next task is to GU10 a couple of Martin mirror head scanners as those bulbs are 15v projector lamps and I know those units DO have a load resistor on them in case of bulb failure, again same diameter as GU10 LED but I will lose the lamp effects such as dimming but I dont mind as strobing is done by the effect wheel, not the lamp. It means the lamps are always on but all 3 units use a blanking section of the shapes gobo wheel for holding the output off. Bit of a story there but just love it when you go inside disco lamps and explain them. Id love a £3000 Chrissy? moving head like they use on strictly come dancing but I fear the leccy bill would rise sharply and the house would burn down ha ha :D
Woah, popped on your channel here at 3 AM just to be met with a new video. What a lovely surprise
one of best shows on yt you and migro for grow lights are really showing use what companies sell us
So maybe I missed something, but from a design standpoint, why bother with all this? Why not just design them to use a normal line voltage AC bulb, given that this was from the tungsten era? I'd certainly imagine it'd be cheaper to not have all the electronics. Was it a heating concern? Power consumption? Or was it one of those "solution in search of a problem" products?
The size of the filament determines the sharpness of the beam. They did make versions with 240V lamps, and the output was fuzzy because of the long vee filament.
Great little fixture, I have this light and love it. Put three or four on a chaser and it looks great. Lytequest made some great units back in the day!
I recognized the filament images instantly you turned it on.
That makes me old.
Oh, well.
I used to work for a man who designed some of the circuit boards for a large British manufacturer of such lights (THE British manufacturer of such lights, really), and spent many hours helping him solder boards, deciding whether the motors moved with the beat, coming up with new designs etc. He even produced his own at one point, working with a gen-u-ine optics expert to use the best lenses rather than just "any old glass convex lens". They were head and shoulders better than the cheap £99 Twister. Alas, cheap and cheerful won.
Happy days though, I learned a lot from him. I often wonder what he'd have made of LED technology, whether he'd be burning the midnight oil as before, coming up with fantastic effects used by every mobile DJ through to top nightclubs.
RIP Phil.
NJD?
@@bigclivedotcom Nope, Abstract
@@Mr.MFuckingYTchangedmyname Another worthy company. Alongside Mode, Pulsar, Mad Lighting and many others.
i have a martin EF-1 mania, where, the lamp is offset next to the lens, but shines through a set of gobo's and onto the motorized mirror reflector, eliminating any dark spots, i have, in the past, toyed with the idea of changing it from the monstrous 100w halogen in it to an LED variant :o
Women can break your hearts, cars and games can break your wallets, sports can break your bones. But Big Clive always strengthens your heart and brain.
I've bought my first moonflower 21 years ago at age 9. I don't remember if it had a stepper motor or just a geared regular one but it changed direction on the beat.
I regret selling it, just because of the nostalgia.
It was almost certainly a standard mains synchronous motor. They have no fixed direction, so just pulsing it on and off makes it bump about in random directions.
15 minutes on, 5 minutes off... hmmm that’s going to happen for the first 20 minutes then it’ll be left on all night 🤣
I have some 100 watt halogen floodlights (they’re about 20 years old, just generic outdoor lights) and they get so hot that you can feel painfully hot heat within about 3 feet of them, and can feel the heat many feet away just when they’re shining on you
@bigclivedotcom You NEED to do a sulfur lamp. Hard to find, especially for cheap. I do know "Hive Lighting" makes some (very expensive), some lab models, and supposedly grow lights?
Cool af tech though
I've come across them in the mini tic-tac form with RF generator and waveguide. The colour tends to have a green tinge.
I like the modulated bar graph paper at @9:54.
Feel better soon, Clive!
2:44 *S L A H T S*
Remember lighting like this, had some constella lighting along with some Martin rainbows that used this effect. Do miss my old Martin 805’s scanners.
I remember old school rave flyers boasting moon flowers as part of the light show 😀
I replaced the 12v transformers for all my halogen down lights with DC power supplies when I installed LEDs. It’s the only LED lamps in my house that have lasted for over 5 years and been on every day for multiple hours. :)
My LED ceiling lights (that replaced 60 and 100W tungstens) have been going for over ten years, the only one I have replaced was in the kitchen, to put in a newer, brighter style. The old kitchen one is waiting to replace the first to fail
The LED lamps are so much better than compact fluorescent, they hardly did better than incandescent bulbs, especially on outdoor lights
@@AdamMansbridge i disagree
It's an inverted mirror ball.
I thirst for knowledge. Would definitely watch a video on the driver.
02:44 : There we go! "SLAATS!!" 😂😂😂
Moonflower made after too many moonshine? 😂
It would be really interesting to see how that mirror dish works with your Disko Shart!
I had two of these back in the day, connected to a sound to light unit
Okay, Clive, now remove the little metal plate blocking the bulb, so that you get a spotlight... with benefits! Sort of like a friend with benefits, but no hanky-panky. 😎
Happy I had 4 of the la 62s with the motors used to tape colour gel on the fronts and ran then on a chaser effective with smoke.
could the efficiency / effect be improved by putting a mirrored square behind the bulb on the barrier, or by lining some of the inside in a reflective material?
The inside has to be as black as possible to get the sharpest beams of light.
Clive.Thats tiny...ooo eer misses! Still using my Geni brand scan moonflower power is 24v lamp 250w. Colour of course. Very heavy and enormous transformer with fan at end. £80 each from maplins 2004.They did sell some things that lasted.Halogen all the way. Get your hands on a harvester central nightclub effect. They were hudge things. Great with smoke.Love to know how the contacts worked with all those spinning spots....?
I have some Geni scanning moonflowers. Good effect.
But does it get hot enough to cook sausages? Maybe some experiments are required.
I have something very similar, picked it up for the equivalent of about 3 UK pounds, it is the mirrors are lacquered with colors and the mirror assembly is attached to a motor that rotates, it is fan cooled so I assume its safe to run long term.. the halogen is also mains voltage.
These things got so hot. So wonder so many fires in old theaters
Could you put a ring of LEDs around the outside of the lens angled in a bit so they pointed at the mirror array?
Can you solar cook a Vienna sausage with that mirror array?
At 6:17 I think he's mistaken: the reflections of every mirror are parallel with each other. That's what you get when the light source, which is almost a point, is located at the foyer of the parabola.
So every mirror sends horizontally tiny images of the candle onto the outer convex lens, resulting in many filaments showing on the wall... except for that one mirorr which is right in front of the bulb... its horizontal image goes through the bulb but gets blocked by the "wall" behind it, resulting in a dark patch.
I think you mean the “focus” of the parabola, not the “foyer”. 🤔
What did he say? 4:53 it sounded like, “let me get the notepad and fuck ass”
Pretty cool unit :)
Rest up and get better brother.
would a resistor across the output of the driver help reduce spikes and save some lamps?
Would you be interested in a schneider compact NSX 630A failed breaker and protection unit?
Would it improve the efficiency if they made the surface of the shield reflective on the bulb side?
No, because every surface the light hits/passes through decreases the light output by about 15%, IIRC. So, the reflector dish absorbs some, then the lens - so a reflective shield wouldn't add much, certainly not enough that you'd notice
I have a very unusual "laser pointer" type of device that I found at a yard sale many years ago that actually has a bulb with a filament in the shape of an arrow. Would love to send it to you if you are interested.
SELV - Safety Extra Low Voltage in the Safety of Office Equipment Industry in relation to live parts accessible to the operator of office equipment BS EN 60950.
Back in the day, we would use lekos and put tin foil with lots of pinholes punched in it inside the lens.
I had a collection of the LQ 82 models, they were oddly rugged and did quite well for the time.. the LED stuff blows away the old halogen lights
Inefficient but does the job, bit like me really... :P
twocvbloke I’m the opposite in a snapshot but the same but likely worse in am averaged out view
I wonder what it would look like if the halogen bulb was replaced with the Big Clive led adapted.
There are also sharp beams (laser) moon flowers with rays circling around each other... more like the high vibrancy gobos. I remeber those beeing pretty old, don't think they had solid state emitters?
I wonder what the 20 somethings would make of a disco setup from our youths. I remember going to London and seeing my first high power laser in us at a club..
Clive can you please show how to make a home made cheap cheap soldering iron
7:20 Never mind 'one moment please', just pull the PSU out - as clearly its mounting 'holes' are open at one end !
It wasn't budging. The washers had pressed into the aluminium.
I am not certain what you shall do next. I am certain that it shall plug into the wall though. I shall watch it regardless. =P
Would the light output be increased if the interior of the unit was painted white instead of black?
Perhaps, but the extra light would not be in the sharp beams. But giving a general flow around them.
So it would be bad for the effect.
Nicely done video and explanation. I was wondering if putting 4x50W LED H7 replacement bulbs into a tungsten moonflower would be sufficient lumens to make the beams reach the clouds. Probably would run into thermal issues beforehand.
The optics of the moonflower may be optimized for the original lamp. You may need to experiment.
@@bigclivedotcom Guess I'll try mounting the leds externally on the side focused on a 45° mirror at the original lanp place. Gonna be some experimenting to get the focal point right. The housing won't be pretty, but the light will be bright. Thanks for your feedback, Clive.
@@seriosertyp8145i know it's been a long time since your comment but i would love to know how it turned out
a video of it would also be great to see
@@HolarMusic To be honest I scrapped the project. Beamshot videos can be misleading. LED/LEP technology is nowhere close to light density, which is crucial for creating light beams with close to zero divergence, compared to discharge lamps. Big Clive made a video showing the inside of a Space Flower. Insane how small the light emitting area of a 2kw+ discharge bulb can be.
you need to make a rotating version of your disco shart......
Okay, so what effect do you get if you replace the tungsten lamp with various types of LEDs pointing at the parabolic mirror?
i need a splooshmaster disko shart in my life
Have you ever looked it a Solar Radiometer?
Those Italian Piergincomi side cutters are absolutely brilliant! About £5 and better quality than anything you can buy up to Engineer's price band in the £25 range. They do a wide range of electronics tools and I am slowly collecting them all as money and need arises. The blades very rarely knick and if they do the steel is good enough that you can usually work it out with a set of diamond cards. And at £5 replacing them entirely is not too stressful.
Although the colour of the handle _does_ look a little off... Is it just the lighting or are these a Chinese knock off? Are they any good? So many questions...
These are generic Chinese side cutters.
@@bigclivedotcom Hey Clive! I _thought_ the yellow was a bit off! The real Piergincomi ones are well worth the £5 though--I dare say that chinese source was deliberately copying their branding because of the quality of the originals. Not Engineer, but not far off.
I wonder how many (if any) will obey the cooling off period after being on? ? ?
😒😒
They didn't.
It would be interesting to construct some optical-effect experiments with that parabolic reflector, a little motor, and color LEDs controlled by a simple microprocessor. That way we can project the "supercomputer" on the wall ;-)
Yay .... where is the video with the Mirror and you undoing the nuts :) LOL
Given the simplicity of this, I wonder if one could make a steam punk version of it. Lit by a candle and with a crank to manually turn the mirrors. Or maybe a hamster wheel for the latter.
So a motor would let it get cooler a bit, right?
7:18 "one moment, please" :)
hi Clive I convert old disco lights to led
That light looks like a Chauvet LX5. I'm selling a pair of Chinese lights on eBay if you're interested in taking a look inside.
One or two of these things in your mobile disco looks cheesy and crap. 12 of them on the other hand looks bloody amazing.
But if you remember if the disco light is from the 90s or 80s Leds were still in there infancy
Mod it to accept LEDs but still using the mirror :-D That would be cool..
Has there ever been a moonflower that used a prism instead of mirrors?
There are some that use the standard system, but then split it with a rotating dichroic prism on the output.
2:39 - Don't we all?
Can u add a smill fan keep it cool
These days the first option would be an LED conversion.
I am disappoint, it doesn't squeak.
4:54 - Wait, do _what_ on the notepad?
Good god I’m old :/
It looks
👍
4:54 - I really thought you said "fuck ass".
I always thought S.E.L.V. was separated extra low voltage. Was I wrong, or is this just another possibility?
Safety Extra Low Voltage ?
@@malcolmtill SELV stands for separated extra-low voltage (separated from earth) as defined in installation standards (e.g. BS 7671), though BS EN 60335 refers to it as safety extra-low voltage. I'd say that 'Separated' is more informative - it means that it has to be done through a transformer so that the voltage is no longer referenced to earth.
@@westinthewest Cool. Thank you. I was a qualified elecchicken and qualified in the 80s which is where I came up with "safety" ELV as with everything the names change. You are absolutely right "Separated" Makes much more sense. Stay safe.
Thanks all.
@@malcolmtill Stay separated :-)
Wow that is really stripped to the bare minimum. No motor to move the mirrors, no cooling fan. Yuck.
True..... 😉
Anyone else want to see that little power supply fail? 😁
What if you could replace the mirrors with a set of multicolour LEDs where each square of the paraobolic mirror is an LED instead? as a modification wouldn't this make it way more efficient use of the light, or would it just look like one of those cheap RGB consumer disco lights Maplins used to sell?
No need to retain the parabolic reflector. The leads of LEDS are long enough that you could arrange your array of LEDs on a conventional PCB, and supported in an appropriately-shaped 3D-printed shim between the LED bulbs and the PCB, such that the LEDS all lie on a spheric section the same distance from a focus point of the spheric section. Relying on high uniformity in the dimensioning of LEDS, the shim would hold each LED, by the bulb's keyed base, at a specific height and in a specific orientation (appropriate to that LED's location in the array), such that each and all LEDs, would point axially at the focal point of the parabolic shim -- which, IIUC, would be the focal length of the lens away from the center position of the array.
Hi
I wonder, isn't this really inefficient? I bet it's really inefficient. It must be.
It's incredibly inefficient. But still packs a punch in a dark room.