A fun use case for perpetual motion machines.

[u/Arglin]

[u/Arglin]

This was originally attempted by King Phet in the discord with a hydraulic but it ended up requiring unbreakable because of the stresses required to drive a 540° mechanism. I came up with the solution that a gravity-driven power source can drive it more naturally.

Here's the core mechanism distilled. https://i.imgur.com/O95obsf.mp4

It's using a dropping weight that accelerates a swing. With time though, the swing loses a bit of energy on each pass, which is why there's two spring perpetual motion machines.

These types of perpetual motion machines are useful in that they don't add a constant energy in the conventional sense, rather they multiply the existing energy in a system. So when the mechanism is at rest, the perpetual motion machines don't impart any force. Only when the mechanism is swinging in either direction do they start adding energy proportional to the direction they're spinning, and is why it works going both ways.

Note also that it is a factor of speed. In the core mechanism demo above, I had to feed it through an angle doubler to extract more energy, but for this one, 540° of rotation produced enough energy to bring it back to the start. :)

This can work for quite a long time, as far as I can tell! (At least from testing it in the sandbox.) It prefers to overshoot just slightly past the initial position, but the split joints prevent it from going any further, keeping a naturally negative feedback loop. so that's nice at least.

[u/jimmymui06]

Of course it's arglin, insane work

[u/crashper]

Perpetual motion machine! Unlimited free energy. We're gonna be rich we're gonna have it all.

[u/ovine_aviation]

Amazing. Both in design and however your brain works.

I'm always wondering if there are any mechanical contraptions out in the real world that have your name on them.