I Guess We Have All Seen/Owned/Played With,

a spinning top,

   some of the ones from my youth would spin for 3 or 4 minutes before falling over, just to be spun again, but imagine this, spinning a top just before you go to bed in the evening, then going to work the next day arriving home and finding the top still spinning! that is what could happen if you bought a top from Fearless Toys, their top was recently recognised by the World Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest-running mechanical spinning top after spinning continuously for a staggering 27 hours, 9 minutes and 24 seconds, but this is no ordinary top, inside it holds a world of secrets, like a special asymmetric flywheel motor, a high-end motion sensor, a rechargeable battery and an advanced system-on-a-chip that constantly monitors Limbo’s stability and applies dozens of motion corrections every second to keep it spinning, the built-in accelerometer inside Limbo detects the direction and spin speed of the top and uses an algorithm to adjust the power of its motor accordingly, 

when the sensor detect a drop in speed, the motor accelerates and so does Limbo, “What makes Limbo so magical is its ability to learn and adapt to the surface it’s spinning on,” said Tom Ben-Yehuda, chief technology officer at manufacturer Fearless Toys Ltd. “It was surprising even for us to witness how clever the control algorithms proved to be, We’ve tried to spin it on some really crazy objects. The first time we spun Limbo on a tomato it was really confused, but in a few seconds time the algorithm figured out the surface and it was like, ‘yeah, I can do that!'” incorporating all of that technology to fit it inside such a tiny toy was a huge challenge, ultimately, they brought the weight of the mechanism down to just 16 grams and managed to squeeze it into less than three cubic centimetres of space, another interesting feature is Limbo’s ability to spin on a variety of surfaces that other spinning tops will not, and to adjust its speed according to the surface it’s spinning on, 

 the top is not yet available but is currently being crowdfunded on Kickstarter, with 52 days to go of its campaign, Limbo has already breezed through its $40,000 goal, at the time of this writing, 2,331 backers had pledged nearly $180,000 to Limbo, You can currently pre-order Limbo by pledging at least $49 on Kickstarter, and no I am not on commission, I am just amazed that a spinning top can spin so long, and that a company has invested all of that time and technology into making one that does.