PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED:
PHOTON TECHNOLOGIES was approached by a major European "Kit" toy manufacturer with a unique problem:

While the "kits" of parts were interesting for the child to put together, and while they could be put together multiple times, after the child assembled the units, they tended to stop playing with the unit and lost interest.

The manufacturer wanted to develop a motorized version of the product that could be placed in the child's room rather than the closet and provide some type of visual movement.

One of the major problems for the new product development was that parents did not want to repeatedly replace batteries in an electrically powered toy product.

Enter PHOTON TECHNOLOGIES and its knowledge of both high volume, high efficiency small solar panels and small, efficient (yet inexpensive) DC motors.

The motorized solar powered product that was designed and developed by PHOTON TECHNOLOGIES was a small 1" wide strip of plastic, onto which the solar cells were imbedded in a two-part clear polyurethane, and then directly attached to the back of the small DC motor. By attaching the strip, which resembled a helicopter or airplane propeller directly to the back of the motor, and then used the motor shaft to be attached to the toy, the motor/solar panel combo would revolve when placed under a desk lamp as one integrated unit.

The product design was very simple in that the motor shaft would fit into a small hole, molded into one of the kit "blocks" that could be installed either on top of the toy, as in the case of a helicopter, or on the front of the toy, in the case of a air plane toy.

The overall advantage of this type of solar powered spinning motor/propeller design was that both the solar panel and the attached DC motor spun as one unit, with on the the shaft attached to the toy. This eliminated having to design some type of power transfer wiring from a stationary motor to the power source, the small solar panel.

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