Indeterminate Design's 3D-Printed Dynamic Spin Balancer Gets Your Wheels Whizzing Safely

Pseudonymous YouTuber "Indeterminate Design" has built a dynamic spin balancer for 3D-printed wheels, driven by an Espressif ESP32 microcontroller, an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit, and a Hall effect sensor.

"This wasn't a project I was expecting to undertake, but a convergence of needs to balance high-speed spinning objects occurred between the Streamliner and 3D-printed turbo compressor projects," Indeterminate Design explains. "I can tell you from experience now that there is nothing scarier or frankly more dangerous than an unbalanced spinning mass at 25,000 RPM."

Inspired by an earlier project from fellow maker CyborgCNC, Indeterminate Design put together a prototype device for the dynamic balancing of wheels — spinning the wheel at high speeds and using an Hall effect sensor to measure the angle of the motor and an MPU6050 IMU to measure whatever imbalance may be found.

"For my purposes this is really all I need to know right now," Indeterminate Design explains. "I know the angle where the imbalance is located and I know a relative unitless magnitude of the amount of the imbalance."

"To locate the imbalance I rotate the motor by hand counter-clockwise, since that's the direction the motor rotates, until the LED lights up and from there because the motor rotated again counter-clockwise I go X degrees counter-clockwise and I will find the heaviest point — and 180 degrees from that is going to be the lightest point. Then I can just add or remove weight and rerun the test until I minimize the average peak acceleration values."

The full video demonstrating the balancer is available on the Indeterminate Design YouTube channel, while the source code and CAD files for the project are available on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.