At one time, the storage capability of compact discs (CDs) appeared unimaginably giant. Who may presumably want a whole bunch of megabytes of storage on a single detachable disc? And apart from the capability, the rainbow created by mild diffraction on the floor of a CD let you already know that you simply have been trying on the future. However as this stuff at all times go, that future is now the previous. A complete era has grown up since that point with smaller, sooner, and higher detachable storage media like SD playing cards. The CD has now been relegated to the cut price bin in second-hand shops.
YouTuber Aaed Musa just lately obtained his palms on a big amount of Mini CDs. Having been born within the 2000s, Musa initially checked out them with confusion earlier than realizing that they’re clearly ammunition for an archaic wrist-mounted gadget supposed to slice fruit and water balloons. Sadly, the civilization that created this gadget will need to have existed way back, and no launchers appear to have survived these a few years. So Musa got down to recreate what it will need to have regarded like.
Being a relic of a time so gone, it was not all that troublesome to breed it with in the present day’s know-how. The launcher itself is solely a flat plate with a flywheel spinning simply above it. Powered by a drone motor, the flywheel can simply spin at as much as 40,000 RPMs. However Musa rapidly realized that above a sure velocity, the CD will slip beneath the wheel, inflicting it to be ejected with much less pressure.
After mapping out ejection speeds, Musa discovered the optimum vary. Not fairly content material with the outcome, a second flywheel was added to extend the velocity with out slippage. This had the impact of accelerating the launch velocity from about 17 miles per hour to over 27 miles per hour. The flywheels have been additionally angled such that the CDs would spin after being launched, which gave them the gyroscopic stability they wanted to remain heading in the right direction.
For fast hearth enjoyable, Musa additionally 3D-printed {a magazine} for the launcher. A spring-loaded hopper holds 25 CDs, and an RC servo motor pushes out one after the other, proper beneath the primary flywheel, which whisks it away. A formidable firing fee of 5 CDs per second was achieved utilizing this technique.
Initially, a 3D-printed wrist mount was created. That may be a good choice, to make certain, however plastic simply doesn’t look as cool as metallic. So Musa had a metallic model produced with a CNC machine. That provides the launcher the look of a weapon that belongs in Terminator 2 , however in actuality, this far-less-than-lethal launcher is a lot better suited to enjoying a spherical of Fruit Ninja in actual life.
Musa digs into the maths and physics of the construct within the mission video, but when that isn’t your factor, don’t fear — you may fast-forward to the destruction of fruit and water balloons, and a few heroic feats of CD marksmanship.
So that is what CDs are for… (📷: Aaed Musa)
Take that, banana! (📷: Aaed Musa)
Launching CDs might end in information loss (📷: Aaed Musa)