As I said on my bio,
I taught Electromagnetism during the second semester of 2016. Since I
wanted my students to have a hands-on learning experience, they had to
build lots of coils: transformers, motors, microphones etc.
As a byproduct of that, at the end of the semester I had a huge amount of unwound and tangled insulated copper wire.
Instead of simply throwing it away (adequately, of course), I thought that maybe it would be possible to recoil those wires so that they could be used again the next year. But, it wasn't a simple matter of recoiling: the insulation is very thin and can be broken at different points along the wire; if two of those points get in contact, there is a short cicuit and the coil does not produce the desired intensity of magnetic field.
I let that idea sit quietly for a while, and during weeks #8 and #9 I realized I should change my project: instead of building an automatic recyclabes sorting can, I decided to build a recoiler that could, during the recoiling, check if the insulation is whole or broken and tell the user exactly where it is broken. This is the first schematic:
As a byproduct of that, at the end of the semester I had a huge amount of unwound and tangled insulated copper wire.
Instead of simply throwing it away (adequately, of course), I thought that maybe it would be possible to recoil those wires so that they could be used again the next year. But, it wasn't a simple matter of recoiling: the insulation is very thin and can be broken at different points along the wire; if two of those points get in contact, there is a short cicuit and the coil does not produce the desired intensity of magnetic field.
I let that idea sit quietly for a while, and during weeks #8 and #9 I realized I should change my project: instead of building an automatic recyclabes sorting can, I decided to build a recoiler that could, during the recoiling, check if the insulation is whole or broken and tell the user exactly where it is broken. This is the first schematic:
But, I soon faced a major problem: in order to recoil tangled wire, I would need to, first, untangle it! And that would ruin the major point of my final project, which was to assist me on my daily work.
After pondering if I should change, again, my final project, I realized a recoiler could still help me a lot: every semester, the university buys big reels of insulated copper wire, reels that might contain kilometers of copper wire. During class experiments, students usually need only a few dozens of meters, so I have to divide the wire from the big reel on smaller reels, in order to avoid queuing.
So, if I could build a device that would automatically recoil wire from one reel to another for a desired length, that would be awesome! And that became my actual final project, as you can see on the above video.
You can read more about the process on Weeks 18 and 20 assignments.
: