For anyone as fascinated with this substance as I am, here [0] is a YouTube video of someone making it 'from scratch'. It's a very detailed explanation, and includes some comparisons of the outcome VS commercial ferro fluids.
When I first saw many of his videos, I was like: "damn, this dude has access to all sorts of chemicals, radioactive stuff, I bet he lives in Texas or Mexico".
Then I learned that he lives in the same city as me.
When I originally found his channel I thought he might be too young to take any sort of seriously, but he handles being that young pretty well. There isn’t a lot of YouTube nonsense, or begging for subscribers, or jokes that for extremely flat. A model for others I think. Really well done.
Although... Explosions and Fire is peak YouTube Chemistry to me!
He has videos dating 7 years back.
I thought he looked young for what he was doing.
Did not see him until quite a bit into the video and it was not what I expected.
Really knowledgeable, a lot of equipment and a really good setup for someone so young. There is also the fact that there is no big source of income that I could easily spot.
Thought of exactly the same exhibit -- love that thing! Worth a stop into NYHS to play with it. I immediately wanted to make one and I'm psyched to see on HN. Evidently it originally had buttons to control the charge, then curators upgraded it with the more tactile wheel controllers.
If it becomes a Kickstarter, I really hope the makers know what they are getting into. There is a lot between a prototype and mass production, and a lot of projects fail between the two.
Keeping it small scale, hand made on demand and high priced may be a safer option.
There is an incredible amount of work between the prototype and mass production. There is however not that much work between a prototype and a campaign video.
This kind of reminds me of the Heptapod writing system from "Arrival". I wonder what contributes to the cost -- is it simply because it's unique, or are some of the materials expensive?
which coats the glass with a layer of silicone polymer.
Not entirely unlike some automotive silicone "waxes" which repel hydrous materials.
Or treatment of the glassware with the much more hazardous dimethyldichlorosilane (DMCS), which actually reacts strongly with the the glass surface at the molecular "sticky points" (which otherwise cause water to wet clean untreated glass and form a H2O film rather than bead up).
The DMCS is pretty rough and you need to handle it under a hood since it can give off more "smoke" consisting of pure HCL vapor sometimes when you open the bottle, compared to opening concentrated hydrochloric acid.
And it eats through the bottle's plastic closure every few years, so it's one of the ones that you need to keep an eye on and replace the cap as needed.
I can't see the video, but if it's the same idea could you give some details on what you used as a suspension fluid and how you dealt with the smearing on the container?
Really cool. With something like this I can't help but imagine combining it with real time signal processing/filtering. Where the visualization can be attached clearly to different components of the music. A vocal filter, melody filter, etc etc. I'm always dissatisfied with how visualizers don't really cue off auditor-ily obvious parts of songs.
Ferrofluid is was used in disk drive motors to seal bearing grease from wandering out so it has reasonable life span of greater than 5 years from my experience
In the 90's and 2000's, car radios and the like had some really interesting visualizations going on. The market for radios and music installations that aren't high-end seems to have pretty much collapsed thanks to mp3 players and bluetooth speakers though. That said, there's still things like portable karaoke speakers that still come with the bells and whistles.
Naive question: could I use a speaker setup similar to this with my analog synth rig to use combinations of sine, saw, and square waves to find combinations of waves that suspended and manipulated this ferrofluid - and would those sound shapes have applications to laser pulses manipulating atoms? Intuitively, it seems like a way to model concepts for macro quantum computer.
While atoms may not behave as liquids, laser pulses are waves. Is there specific reason why not?
Yeah, you may find that due to the mass and length scale due to the viscosity/surface tension etc. would require sub audible frequencies. Totally worth trying. As far as atomic manipulation, no since that needs to be in a hard vacuum and low temperature. The same wave interference principle is used in that technology though.
That interference principle seems like a function of the size of the blobs and then how you manage the interference patterns of multiple oscilators. Mind you, if you can physically do it with audio synths, you can model it in software, which means we should be able to use ML via a GAN to grind through oscillator patterns to create the necessary pulse effect results.
I've always wanted to make something like this. I'm curious about parsing the fields into something both pleasing and physically representative of the actual waveform of the music. I'd also like to play around with using the fluid as a driver as well, though I'm sure getting sound out of it would be immensely difficult if not impossible without a horn the size of a barn. As far as I'm aware it has yet to be attempted.
Definitely the most creative use of ferrofluid I've seen for a long time. However I fear that long term you might have problems with the ferrofluid separating, emulsifying or oxidizing. It would be interesting if we got updates on how it holds up after a few weeks or months of use.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6L8yUY-doNc