Scrappy Solar Do-Nothing Prototypes

Over the years, I’ve been inspired by the work of Charles and Ray Eames for several tinkering projects. And during the past weeks, I’ve been exploring some new ideas for tinkering with solar panels including scrappy circuit boards and garden light dissections and looking for inspirations in the real world for these projects. So of course the Eameses’ iconic “solar do-nothing machine” is a natural source for lots of ideas and directions for new projects. The Eames Office explains the film by saying, “true to the Eameses’ belief that toys are not as innocent as they appear, the machine was one of the first uses of solar power to produce electricity.”

I found some solar spinner toys with handcrafted wooded bases in the farmers’ market here in Freiburg and was intrigued by the way the assemblies used the motors in a bit of a reverse way. Instead of attaching something to the shaft, the axle is help stable and the entire motor piece rotates.

I thought that maybe I could find a way to use the parts while using scrappy recycled materials so I bought a sample solar rotor element and converted an old sparkling water bottle to make a customized helicopter.

I wanted to see what else I could do with this part, so I took inspiration from a youtube magic spinner guide from WICO collaborator Noga Elhassid. I thought that this project could be more of a complete aesthetic creation that could take advantage of the constantly turning solar rotor. It worked really well on our little balcony garden and working with the everyday materials made me wonder if I could recreate the solar panel and motor base unit using homemade materials.

I put together three versions with different motors and arrangements of solar panels using cardboard, foil, hot glue, tape and small pieces of wine cork. I found that they didn’t work with indirect sunlight so I waited for a sunny day and on the weekend I tested them in a bright field in the countryside.

Here are two videos of the working models spinning on their own. As I tilted the machine I found that it made a huge difference for how fast the piece rotated. I saw on the Eameses’ solar do-nothing video that the solar panel had reflectors so I also experimented with adding shiny pieces to the constructions.

After these initial experiments I want to try to create a collection of beautiful and whimsical designs. I love how in the Eames’ video there are parts that cast interesting shadows, mechanisms that use the spinning to power linkages and designs that have bright colors and patterns. I think that this could be a really interesting workshop where we could end up with a collection of unique and personally meaningful projects.