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Great idea! Are you using just mechanical pressure to keep the wires attached to the rotating parts of the bearings? It seems like it might become a noise/reliability problem. Soldering to stainless steel is probably difficult...

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I wonder if you could just wind together a non-contacting magnetic ballast and rotate that. A ballast is mainly a step-up transformer; it would be something like two concentric helices of wire with an iron core.

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Where was this idea when I needed it 3 months ago!

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Very elegant!
I recently was helping an artist with a kinetic piece, which required a slip ring for a fairly high-current power connection- he wound up using a mercury slip ring- something I'd never seen before. Not something you'd want to home-brew, but cool to know about:
http://www.mercotac.com/index.html

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Cool idea! Probably not a good idea for substantial currents as there could be welding/unwelding of the balls leading to crunchy bearings after not too long. It's probably pretty noisy for signal transmission too. For the purpose here though, fantastic!

The transformer thing would work, KWillets. I've used tuned coupled circuits for RF as well. Non-contact is good for high speed rotation and AC signals.

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Thanks for your interest.
So far I have not had any problems wit reliability or noise. It seems to work find to run 120 Volt through the bearings.
I will set up the project in Berlin in a few weeks and then let it run for a while. I will report back to you.

I will also try to run audio through the slip ring connector, just for fun to see how noisy the connection really is.

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Am I using mechanical pressure to hold the wires?

The outside rings have small screws that are touching them with terminal connectors.
On my site I have more images on how I build the inside connection.
http://maybevideodoes.de/howto/slipring.html

But yes I use mechanical pressure. I grinded a small space in the inside ring for the wires to fit in and then pushed the ball bearing ring over it.

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I just finished the show in which I used the slip ring connectors. They worked great for my purposes (fluorescent light tubes). I had them running for about two hours straight and no power cut outs. This means the rotatable connection is pretty solid.

I also tried running an mono audio signal through the rings but it turns out the electrical connection creates too much noise and the audio gets cut up.

cheers
stephan schulz

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I just finished the show in which I used the slip ring connectors. They worked great for my purposes (fluorescent light tubes). I had them running for about two hours straight and no power cut outs. This means the rotatable connection is pretty solid.

I also tried running an mono audio signal through the rings but it turns out the electrical connection creates too much noise and the audio gets cut up.

to see a video and more images go to
http://maybevideodoes.de/sites/neon.html
cheers
stephan schulz

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I am quite interested in making the slip rings I don't require more than 2 amps and 12v ac. The ideas on the 2 coils and the iron cores is also interesting. Any body got any ideas on the coil sizes etc.?
Cheers
RicG

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I did a quick check on the internet and there seems to be many companies making standard slip ring connectors, such as http://www.polysci.com/ .

Maybe they have something that can transmit audio without much noise.

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