Prayer Wheel (stroboscopic)

This was another device that came out of my experiments with Jisho Roche Adachi, a small and simple platform for short animations the Stroboscopic Prayer Wheel. 

Here is the prayer wheel in some initial drawings in Jisho's notebook, the white scrap of paper on the left of the book is the strobe trigger I planned to use.

The basic structure of the prayer wheel consists of an acrylic tube with laser cut plywood end caps.  Bearings were pocketed into the end caps allowing a threaded rod to be inserted through the wheel's body and the maple handle while still allowing the body to spin freely.

Here are the guts of the wheel, you can see the control circuit suspended above the lower plate which has a series of 8 magnets to trigger the strobe.  Three leds were mounted above the control plate and pingpong balls were stuck over them to act as diffusers, so the light would be distributed evenly.   

Finally, a weight consisting of washers and felt disks to prevent damage to the acrylic was added making it possible to spin the wheel by tipping your wrist slightly as in traditional Tibetan Prayer Wheels.

With the mechanism complete we added an eight frame velum animation sequence, to produce this very satisfying result.