LED Juggling Clubs

There are a small number of clubs for sale commercially that have lighting, but they're not very impressive to say the least and they all seem to have translucent lighting, which has limited appeal to me. I wanted to have point lights and would eventually like to try some persistence of vision in a juggling club. I probably wouldn't spell out words like on a Spoke POV or Mini POV, but you could do some interesting streaking and patterns, especially with an accelerometer/gyro.

I've thought a bunch about how to make a robust juggling club with good illumination and it's no easy task. Just looking at a basic juggling club, it's not much more that a plastic body, a wood dowel depending on the type, some tape, a couple staples or screws, some glue, and decorations. And even these simple designs last somewhere around a year or so depending on how much you juggle and how much you abuse them. Now add batteries, wires, solder joints, circuit boards--and without making it too heavy--it's a really hard.

To get started, I bought a set of unassembled (by request) Renegade clubs and put in a bunch of green LEDs. I drilled some tight fitting holes for 5mm diodes, soldered wires on, and hot glued everything in place, which makes good strain relief. The LEDs stuck out a bit so I ground them down, being careful not to hit the little lead wire coming out the center of the die. I put a big a hole in the side of the body where the battery pack and drive circuit fit through and snap into place on the dowel. Originally I imagined taping on the cut out piece like a door, but that quickly became annoying for switching the clubs on and off so now I just leave the doors off.

I like high efficiency circuits for long battery life, so I used a MicroPuck to drive 15 high brightness LEDs in series. It's a very small boost converter with lots of battery configuration options.

This first picture shows the wiring, the door, and the driver/batter pack. The wiring is on the outside for solder, but later I put everything on the inside.

This is a close-up of the driver and battery pack, including the power switch. I cut a plastic tube into a C shape that snaps over the dowel to stay centered in the club. It has three AAA holders and the driver all glued on.

Here's an early test of the club illumination. I added three red LEDs pointed down the handle because it was too hard to see the handle when juggling in the dark.

This is a close-up of the LEDs for the handle. They each have their own current limiting resistor because they don't run on the boost converter.

The LEDs are very bright, which make them a difficult to juggle in the dark, but the point illumination effect is nice. In future versions I'd like to incorporate dimming, especially as ambient light gets darker. Here are a couple examples of what you can do with a long exposure:

LED Juggling Clubs

D300, f/3.5, 4s, ISO-100, AF-S Nikkor18-135mm at 18m

LED Juggling Clubs

D300, f/3.5, 13s, ISO-100, AF-S Nikkor18-135mm at 18m

Slackline Diagram

   Two years ago, at burningman, I tried out a slackline and thought it was a blast. So I went and bought some webbing and started playing with it on my own. After some trial and error and watching some bad youtube videos, I managed to be get it setup and taught with the help of about five people pulling on it. Then I met a fellow juggler, Nate Williams, at the 4th annual Berkeley Juggling & Unicycle Festival who gave me some good tips for easy slackline setup. I liked it enough to draw out a diagram so that I could remember how to do it. The best part is the line locker, which is just a 3/8" chain link. It's easy to setup, holds the line flat, and comes out easy with no tight knots to fight with later. Also, I now use only friction to hold the line as shown in the diagram, whereas I used to tie it off. One other nice thing is the 3x multiplier which makes it so that I can pull the line tight by myself.

   My friends and I decided to build a theme camp (Circus Bootcamp) at burningman in 2008, so I built a wood frame for the slackline. I set set it up at ocean beach to test out the anchors, which are the screw type from McMaster-Carr. It worked fine, but the anchors were very difficult to install and remove in the playa.

Slackline setup at Ocean Beach, San Francisco:

Slackline at Circus Bootcamp, 2008:

And here's a great photo of a burner jumping on my line:

I love taking photos at night. This one was at Shinneyboo Creek Cabins near Tahoe, California. I used the camera raw tools in photoshop to pull the image out of a very dark exposure.

D300, f/1.8, 10s, ISO-200, AF Nikkor 50mm 1:1.8

Fiber Optic Ring Flash

I was inspired by Joris van den Heuvel over at Fuzzcraft with his experiments building fiber optic ring lights, so I decided to make one myself. It's made completly from parts and materials that I had laying around:

* main ring -- 3" ABS pipe
* fibers from a toy lamp
* 4-40 screws
* cardboard forms made from a cereal box
* epoxy to hold the fibers in place.

The hardest part was drilling all the little holes in the ABS pipe for the fibers. They're only about 0.5mm, and if you've every tried to drill small holes in plastic, you know how easy it is to melt the plastic and mess up the hole. I ended up drilling slowly, clearing chips often, and with lots of water for cooling/lubrication. Once I got I the holes drilled, I discovered that the fibers varied greatly in size. Since the holes varied a bunch, this worked out fine, but it took some time to match fiber size to hole size and made for an uneven light pattern, as you can see in the reflection in my sister's pupil:

My sister's eye -- hand held, daytime, indoors

D300, f/10, 1/60s, ISO-400, AF Micro Nikkor 60mm 1:2.8

Once the fibers were in place, I poured on epoxy to hold it all together. This worked fine, but was a bit messy. Once the epoxy was all cured, I ran both ends of the fibers on a belt sander to flatten them out. They still need polishing for best results. Even so, it's functional, at least for macro photography. It's not currently bright enough for more than a few inches away, so it's not great for portraits yet. And, the fibers definitely do not all transmit the same amount of light. Some are too small, while others are either bent too tightly or were damaged in construction. Nonetheless, it's working, and I'm happy to be able to take hand held macro shots in low light:

Garden spider -- hand held at night

D300, f/10, 1/60s, ISO-200, AF Micro Nikkor 60mm 1:2.8

Crested gecko -- low light, indoors

D300, f/16, 1/60s, ISO-800, AF Micro Nikkor 60mm 1:2.8

Other than needing polishing that I mentioned above, I'd like to paint it -- maybe silver underneath with a flat-black top coat. Currently, I use a piece of aluminum foil over the top to help get light into the fibers and keep it from going straight through and washing out the top half of the shot.

Next time, I'd use higher quality fibers, position the holes better, and try to get more even light.