final project proposal
For my mechanisms and living art final I’d like to build organically moving kinetic sculptures. To this end and in order to get away from the mechanical feeling that comes with motors, gears, and the like, I’ve decided to employ Flexinol (Nitinol brand name, also known as NiTi/muscle wire, a shape memory alloy [SMA]) as my actuator.
The first sculpture I intend to build is a helical, snake-like sculpture that will have mirrors for scales. These scales will be able to move in one (possibly two) dimension(s). By synchronizing the scales according to different rules, different patterns of movement and light could be created.
In effect, every scale is a self-contained unit consisting of a mirror mounted on a hinge (or some kind of a rod end bearing), to which two Flexinol wires are attached, close to the pivot point as to use the mechanical advantage of the lever in order to increase the range of motion of the mirror. Activating the wire will cause it to contract and pull that side of the mirror downwards, while activating the wire on the other side will reverse that action. This design is easily scalable by adding more wires to allow for more precise tilting action.
The second sculpture is a Buckyball/geodesic dome covered by a flexible polymer (perhaps vinyl/rubber?) . Inside every unit of the dome there will be a mechanism capable of driving an outwards protrusion motion of a rod, thereby creating a porcupine-like impression. The mechanism will consist of, again, a Flexinol wire, this time utilizing a right angle pull and a bias spring in order to triple the stroke length. When contracted, the wire will push the rod outwards and deform the elastic shell. Similarly to the previous sculpture, the combined action of many identical units will be used to create organic patterns of movement.
Here are some rough sketches… unfortunately the scanner was broken so here are some low quality pictures taken with my phone:
The schedule for the project is as follows: I will spend the coming week testing the two mechanisms and finalizing them, which will allow me to order parts and laser-cutting for the Buckyball and potentially also the scale units. The week after that will be dedicated to building, which will leave the final week for testing and troubleshooting. Other than the laser-cutting job(s), most of the components required are readily available or are already in my possession (e.g. Flexinol wire). I expect to budget to be less than $150 (excluding AMS laser-cutting fees).
turtles
Morgen and I presented our mechanisms midterm this week. We tried replicating terrestrial turtle locomotion using legos, which turned out to be harder than we expected. Check out Morgen’s post for the full coverage.
lego lab
For this week’s assignment for the Mechanisms class we had to play with lego, which is pretty awesome. Too bad almost all the kits are missing a lot of stuff. Anyhow, here are the results of several hours of Neil and I messing around:
rube goldberg egg breaker machine
Yeah, it’s sideways….