A Minnesota project

Hi guys,
I stumbled upon some of the videos on youtube which led me here. I am enamored by some of the projects out there and my inner engineer told me I have to make some! So I went out and bought some parts and cobbled together a PVC jet yesterday that I screwed onto the end of a garden hose. It worked enough which made me want to improve it, so today I fashioned a brass ring which greatly improved the stream, now I have about 1/2" diameter laminar flow that shoots about 10' in the air off the city water pressure.

I spent the afternoon reading the forum to learn how to light up the stream. Now I'm off to purchase some fiber optic cable.

This is a great outlet to let my creativity run wild. The hard part is convincing the wife I need a laminar water jet when we don't have a pool or a pond!

Bulk purchasing 3000 straws also made her scratch her head!

-K

Hi K, welcome to the forum!

I am glad your project works well enough to continue developing it.

I think that the "wife issue" is a common problem to many of us!
Regarding the lack of a pool... What about looking for a nice marble concave block to place it just in the middle of your garden... then you can let the laminar flow fall in the middle of the cavity an then splash on the garden to water it? I mean, the effect will be similar as you play with a spoon under the kitchen faucet. I'll bet your wife will enjoy the project too!

Have fun!
Leonardo.

I got the green and blue LEDs working today in the water nozzle, so I made some videos.....

Right now I am running the LEDs about 4W-5W, but they are 90W LEDs so I am working a circuit that can drive them harder which means they will be much brighter.

Green:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvdQg83eKuM

Blue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLOYywJyQpk

90W LED's!!! Where did you get those?

I took them out of a DLP projector development kit - specifically this one: http://www.logicpd.com/products/development-kits/dlp-lightcommander-development-kit

Phlatlight PT54:
http://www.luminus.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/0/475358118eae0708853a4e91bccaddbc/misc/pds_001051_pt54_summary_datasheet_rev07.pdf

Looks like I did the math wrong too -- max current is 13.6A, so only 67W at their peak.
I have parts on order to drive them at 12A each, I'll let you know how it goes, I hope it doesn't melt the fiber!

-K

How are you cooling that?

Each LED is mounted to a heatsink. I'll post some pictures soon.

I moved my new posts to the Project Thread here.

I purchased my 3.0MM PMMA cable from this website:
http://createnewstuff.com/

-K