Especially if the charging port/cord is integrated into a stand for the ball. The ball can charge while displayed and even better if it can light up on the stand. Either way, battery life would be more than acceptable. Would induction charging be overly complicated?
alright, let me try to address batteries issues a bit as the previous message wasn't explaining everything
Julie did a LOT of testing for the electronics. The initial idea was to use a lit ball she found that was 7.6cm diameter, I based the whole 3D model on it so it would perfectly fit inside. This worked, however, the light was very weak and after a bit of testing, the batteries were dead. It was using 2 CR2032 to get 6V of power.
For further comparison, CR2032 batteries have roughtly 200mAh.
At this point, the light wasn't very powerful, but she was mostly worried about the battery life, so she started doing tests to use other batteries instead of the not very durable CR2032. The issue is that we need 6V to light up those leds, AA and AAA are only 1.5V, so she needed to use 4 of those to get to 6V.
And here comes the main issue, room inside the ball. There is 7.6cm of room inside the sphere, 4 AA batteries don't fit, so this ruled it out.
AAA batteries have approximatively 1250mAH, this is already 6 times supperior to the CR2032 batteries, so that's already pretty good. The issue is still size sadly, she needed to use a 4 AAA batterie holder, it already takes a lot of room, so you have to arrange leds around the batteries to avoid any dark spots on the ball. Without going into too many details, this voids the advantage of the extra life of the AAA batteries because we are now adding leds around the batteries and dividing the battery life each time, going back to the previous battery life we had before with the two small batteries and one powerfull led. So in the end, more work, more material, same result.
She also tried with a 9V battery alone, 9V batteries have approximatively 500mAh, which is not great and they start loosing power immediately, going toward 7-8V really fast. So this didn't work well at all and wasn't an improvement on battery life.
And finaly, you are mentioning actual charging batteries, we have searched everywhere, those are always too big to fit into the ball sadly. We also can't ship lithium batteries ever. so this is not possible sadly.
Julie then started working with DC12V stuff and she is now getting great result. She is using two rings of folded 5050 led strips and the light is super powerfull, finally giving a real lit feeling when you have it in your hand or laying on a table.
SO, in short, she will normally be offering two versions, one version with 2 CR2032 batteries and one led at the bottom of the ball. This will be seemless from the outside and will have a slightly weaker lit effect, but you will be able to take it into your hand, turn it on with the remote and so on. You'll need to open the ball to change the batteries when they run out.
And another version that will be DC12V, will have an awesome lit effect like showed before, that you can still take in your hand when not lit as the plug will be discrete, but it will have to be plugged to light up.
They will come at a different price point, the DC12V has a lot more material and work involved. The battery powered version will be as initially planned and will only use a very cheap led and remote, so the cost will be 98.5% Julie's work on the ball and not the electronics. Like I said to a person in a previous message that wanted to try himself at electronics, people can buy this version, it will light up, and they are free to remove the light inside the ball and replace it with anything else they can find. And worst case scenario, if it doesn't work, they can put back the provided light inside and get back to what they got in the first place.
Sorry for the long and technical message, this was to go into more details, I hope this helps a bit.
This summarizes easily 3 weeks of stressful testings for Julie, buying more stuff each time it was failing and getting pretty discouraged each time. The DC12V stuff was the light at the end of the tunnel and we are finally happy we can offer something really cool
cheers all!
