We bought a cheap mini disco ball (like $5 at Walgreens or something) a few months back. It works alright, except it spins way to fast, so it doesn't do the disco effect. If I spin it slower manually, it does the effect just fine, so I figure if I can find a way to slow it down, it'll be good. My initial idea was to open it up and throw some extra resistors in there, but after reading up on things on the internet, extra resistance may not actually slow down electric motors like that.
I'm hoping someone here has an idea for how to do this. I assume the best options are either to mess with the electronics, or to somehow modify the gear(?) system it has. I don't really know much about electric stuff unfortunately. It runs on 3 AA batteries in the base, has 3 colored LEDs on the top of the base.
I'm not really out much money if there's no good way to do this, but I thought it would be neat to get it working.
A few pictures:
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It's been a while since i've taken circuits, but you won't be able to change the voltage to the motor with just resistors, you'll just change the current. It looks battery operated, so you can try to use a lower voltage batter (you'll just have to adjust it so the leads can properly contact a smaller batter.)
edit:
Note: For the following, while I did get an A in my circuits class :P It has been about 5 years since i took it and i could be wrong about the following:
Reading your post a little more closely i noticed it is batter opperated (3 AA), are the batteries in series or parallel? I believe you can slow the motor down by lowering the voltage applied to it. If your batteries are in series then the voltage is added (i think all rounded batteries are 1.5 volts so in series you'd have 4.5 volts to the motor) in parallel the batteries share one voltage (so you'd have 1.5 volts total). So you can fiddle around with this to change the voltage to your motor.
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yeah i forgot about that, you're just trying to close the circuit if you remove a battery.
In regards to the advocates of his former empire: “I was going to have them all executed… the Royal Advocate talked me out of it.” -Shadowthrone (Emperor Kellanved)
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The batteries will be in series. You don't want to wire batteries in parallel because it doesn't increase the voltage and if the voltage of the batteries varies by a small amount, you could end up damaging them. So you could rig it to run on fewer batteries.
Similarly, you could also add resistors to the circuit. That should slow down the motor, which should depend on how much current is flowing through it.