A friend has an bimonthly “art salon” and this month’s theme was “Illusion”, so I thought a zoetrope would make a fun project.
When I tried it for the first time, I thought it didn’t work, everything was super blurred. Then I brought it into the living room to show my “failure” to my wife and son and it worked beautifully!
The difference? LED vs natural light. LED lights are actually strobing at high speed, too fast to notice, but enough to interrupt the stroboscopic effect of the zoetrope.
This would have come out a lot better if I had sussed out how to make angled cuts into the wood. Because I had to hand cut and sand the edges to account for the rectangular slats arranged in a circular pattern, I ended up with gaps that I filled with masking tape. Meh.
Wow! You can make angled cuts with a jig to hold one side up, although it may be tedious. Many designs I’ve seen use some kind of frame to avoid that issue.
Nice call on the LEDs. (I was thinking I would cover the thing and then get a sensor and use a strobing LED set to the right frequency…)
