The FASTEST LITTLE MOTOR CONTEST!
 

• * PRIZES! PRIZES! PRIZES!  FIND GOOD PRIZES!
•    ORGANIZE A CONTEST AT YOUR OWN SCHOOL.
•    YOU CAN USE A SMALL ENTRY FEE TO PAY FOR THE PRIZES OR
•    YOU MAY FIND CORPORATE SPONSORS OR
•    YOU MAY FIND INTERESTED PARENTS TO DONATE PRIZES.

• * IF YOU ARE LOCATED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA
•    WE MAY BE ABLE TO ASSIST YOU IN ORGANIZING A CONTEST.

The ElectroWizard Inventions Book and the ElectroWizard CD-ROM have instructions for building a very simple electric motor. The challenge in this contest is to make this motor spin as fast as you can.

Here are the rules of the contest:

1. The motor must be made with magnet wire and permanent magnet(s).
2. Your must use only a single 1.5 volt D cell battery.
3. You may not use any active electronic devices to control the current to the motor.

How to enter the contest on the internet:

E-mail us:

1. Your name.
2. Your address.
3. Your phone number.
4. Your Birth date.
5. A measured speed for you motor.

If you have obtained a new record we may ask for verification and a description of how you achieved the new record in the form of:

a. A 15 second tape recording or .WAV file of the sound your motor makes.
b. A drawing or image and description of the factors you manipulated to achieve your result.

If your result is verified we will publish your name (with your permission) as the new record holder.

In the case of dubious results, we reserve the right to ask for furhter proof.

Measuring the speed of the motor.

There are a number of ways to measure the velocity of the motor. If you find a better way let us know and we will post it here.

Here are the methods:

1) Record the motor spinning with your computer's sound card. The advantage of this method is that you can display the results in your sound editor and easily count the cycles to see how fast your motor is running. If you have achieved a new record, we may need for you to either e-mail the actual sound file or to transfer to a floppy disk and mail it to us.  Please do not send us the data, unless we ask for it.

Computer Method 1:
Try recording the sound of the motor spinning with your microphone. It may be difficult to get sufficient volume, but if you can this is the easiest way to go.

Computer Method 2:
Make a pickup coil and connect it to your computer as follows:
1. Wind about 200 turns of magnet wire around the dowel in the Inventions Kit.
2. Tie the coil together with the leads.
3. Sand the ends of the leads of the coil.
4. Connect the two leads to a mini phone jack that will fit into the microphone input on the back of your computer. See the drawing for detail.
5. Connect mini microphone jack to the microphone input of your computer.
6. Place the pickup coil as near as possible to the running motor and record the signal.

Computer Method 3:
Unfortunately the sounds that the motor produces resembles the type of noise that you don't want in most of your audio recordings and some of the better sound cards will filter them out. An alternative if your sound card won't record this sound is to connect a buzzer in parallel with your motor. The sound will vary in time with the motor.

Tape Recorder Method: If you don't have access to a computer with a sound card, record the sound of the motor running on a cassette tape recorder and mail that recording to us.

To measure how fast your motor is running bring the recorded wave file into a sound editor. (If you don't have a sound editor, COOL is a shareware editor that is available on the net.) Count the number of clicks for an interval of time. From this you can calculate the number of rotations per minute (RPM). Here is how to do this. If you count the clicks in 1 second the RPM is 60 times the number of clicks, if you count the number of clicks in 10 seconds the RPM is 6 times the number of clicks.