Here’s your useful and beautiful circuit for the day — [New Pew]’s vibration sensor takes manual control of the flip-flop inside a 555 timer and lights an LED in response. Use it to detect those vibrations you expect, like laundry machines, or those you only suspect, like the kind that might be coming from your engine. This gadget isn’t super-precise, but it will probably get the job done.
The vibration-detecting bit is a tiny ball bearing soldered to the spring from an old pen, which is tied between the trigger and ground pins of the 555. When the chip is powered with a 9 V battery, nearby vibrations will induce wiggle in the spring, causing the ball bearing to contact the brass rod and completing the circuit. When this happens, the internal flip flop’s output goes high, which turns on the LED. Then the flip flop must be reset with a momentary button. Check out the build video after the break.
Want to pick up Earthly vibrations? You can detect earthquakes with a homemade variable capacitor, a 555, and a Raspberry Pi.
Exactly what you need to detect Tilt on your homebuilt pinball machine ;)
That would be the worse tilt sensor ever. The flippers alone would probably create enough vibrations to tilt the machine. The gap is way to small for a pinball tilt. There is nothing simpler than a real tilt bob , which is simply a hanging weight around a ring, been proven to work perfectly for what .. 40 years at least.
If you use a monostable 555 circuit, the circuit will reset itself.
But then you wouldn’t know if there were vibrations while you weren’t looking.
You would also be able to know how often vibrations are happening though.
This convo has made me happy. Cordial and through debate, we realize you’re both correct. Just based on what the particular use case is.
Well done.
You can already tell by looking at the ball on the spring.
The guy has some magical solder to be able to just briefly touch a steel ball and a spring and have them stick. They’re massive heatsinks.
Probably not really soldered
Use big plumbers iron, drop of HCl for flux and silver solder.
Looks like the “trembler” in the movie The Rock
Came here for this. Thank you fellow old person.
Copper wire, not brass rod.
Why didn’t [New Pew] cut that extra bit of leg sticking out where the pink wire is attached? Man, that just tweaks my obsessive-compulsive solder disorder!
these are kind of fun motion sensors somewhat the same idea:
https://signalquest.com/product/components/sq-sen-200/