Thanks to social media, I want to build a double pendulum. Anyone done it? Saw one design made of wood which was okay, but didn’t have much energy to sustain the chaotic movement. I tried reading wikipedia article about them, but yeah urrm. Would increased weight would mean more energy? I don’t know. Guess there’s only one way to find out! I could stick some LEDs on it give it to the kids to whack them in the face when they peer to closely at it hahaha ;-).
I’ve got some old bearings I could use from various bike components might be useful for experimenting with, sprinkle in a UV LED or two, and a surface coated with glow in the dark paint.
Which lead to harmongraphs, which look quite fun, (for probably a limited amount of time, or maybe quite a long time), but would be pretty cool. More complex to build though, spherical magnets, long thin pieces of wood, ~10kg of small weights etc.
Of course I wondered what would happen to the harmongraph if the 3 pendulums were double pendulums, might be interesting.
This is what they generally look like and this video also shows a variety of nice plots:
