At long last, we have figured out a cheap and easy way (a.k.a. the DIYnamics way!) of capturing footage of demonstrations on the DIYnamics table from the rotating frame. A simple tripod for phone cameras sits on the DIYnamics table, with its three legs surrounding the tank in the middle. The phone can be fastened to the tripod in two ways.

1. Use the detachable clip that comes with the tripod to fasten the phone into place, and then orient it to point down towards the tabletop. The footage won’t be from directly overhead, but it still looks good.
2. Use duct tape to fasten the camera into place between the three tripod legs. With enough tape, you can create a surprisingly sturdy base that will keep your phone in place even at fast rotation rates.

In either case, be sure to get the camera into place before filling the tank! That way, if you accidentally drop the phone while setting it up, it won’t end up taking a bath! Once the phone is fastened into place with either method, it should be pretty secure, even when the table is rotating. But no matter what, you’re ultimately hanging an expensive phone in air directly (or almost directly) above a tank of water, so be careful throughout! (Here’s where our lawyers would have us put in a disclaimer about not being liable for damages blah blah…if we had lawyers.)

We created new “recipe” videos to show several demonstrations using this new capabality. Here’s the one for baroclinic instability:

And one for solid-body rotation:

And one for the behavior of non-rotating fluids:

And one for the “spinning dye curtain”: