This year for Makers Secret Santa, I was challenged to make a gift for This Old Tony. Inspired by his love of benders and bending, I built him a toy from my childhood in the shape of a letter T. It's got a magnetic spinning device that rides along the wire, and little bends near the handle provide a turnaround point so you can, with practice, get the spinner to move continuously along the track.

This toy was first introduced as Whee-Lo the Magnetic Walking Wheel in 1953, and remained popular for some decades. I remember enjoying it in the early 90s-- like a yo-yo, it was fun to see how long you could keep it going. And like a fidget spinner, there's some satisfaction in the manipulation of gyroscopic force.

Supplies

To make this project, I used:

Replica Whee-Lo toy
D.I.Wire Pro CNC wire former
Seeed Xiao RP2040 microcontroller
Adafruit lipoly backpack charging board
Switch
Small lipoly battery
Tiny Neopixel strip
30g stranded wire in three different colors
3D printer
3D printer filament
Wire strippers
Flush cutters
Soldering iron and solder
Hot glue
Epoxy
Multimeter

Step 1: Watch the Video

Get into the Secret Santa spirit! Here's the build video to go along with this project. Watch to the end to see what I received in the gift exchange.

Step 2: Bend Wire

To make my own Whee-Lo, I'd need to bend a bunch of shapes out of wire, and those shapes would have to be aligned quite accurately to provide a consistent track for the wheel. To achieve such repeatable precision, I used the D.I.Wire Pro machine from Pensa Labs, which is a benchtop CNC wire former.

I created my shape in Adobe Illustrator and exported it as three different SVGs. My design requires bends in two different planes, so I need to rotate the workpiece 90 degrees between the sections. After some training and experimenting, I got the hang of cranking out a whole bunch of the three-part pieces needed to create my design.

Step 3: 3D Print Handle

For connecting the pieces at the bottom, I whipped up a quick handle in Tinkercad. It's got grooves at the corners for the wires to sit in, and a second piece to cover the epoxy joints and wire ends.

Whee-Lo Handle (Secret Santa 2022)

Step 4: Build Electronics Into Wheel

While the glue was drying, I got to work on the electronics inside the wheel. I opted to remove the electronics from the existing plastic wheel and replace them with my own.

The circuit isn't overly complex when you look at the diagram. Still, this build is exceptionally tiny, so the soldering is tricky and the positioning of everything matters a lot more, as does the gauge and length of the wires.

I made a few wheels and experimented with different positioning of the LED strip. I settled on ringing the core with a strip on each side, which lit up the wheel more completely than the radial positioning I had tried at first. My NeoPixel animation Arduino code can be downloaded here: