I'd love to see a small Prince Rupert's drop for a tip and a ruby/sapphire spinning surface - you'd need to make a ton of drops, probably, but having a round, nearly spherical contact geometry and super smooth surface seems like a winning combo.
Awesome!
Did make me wonder if you could build a solid state one using well-timed pulses through an electromagnet that provide torque through the field interaction with the earth's magnetic field.
Not much torque available there obviously, but on a per-revolution basis you don't need much.
At around the end of the fidget spinner craze I thought "but what would it take to make it spin by its own?" And it turned out, not much. Just put one magnet at each of the three ends, and have some pulsating magnet near it (next to it, or under it hidden in some kind of base), and there! you have a basic electric motor that seems entirely magical.
It was a really fun experiment; I even toyed with doing a small production run but by the time I was almost ready the craze had passed.
How long would a better battery go here?
I'm curious what the jump from 2-> 40+ hours requires
Guess it's cnc milled, maybe that's part of it. Increase mass of the thing? Idk
The material science discussion in these comments is fascinating. Never thought about how the contact point geometry matters so much. Diamond tip makes intuitive sense for hardness, but then you need something it can spin on without scratching...
And now that I think a bit further, I might just be imagining a more complicated version of one of those crabwalk spinny metal ones..
If you could develop a self-starting top capable of remote controlled translational movement you would get non-wheeled weight bonuses up to 2x in most competitions.