In this midterm project, we are asked to make something that can move with one of the 507 mechanical movements.

At first, I planned to make combination of a bunch of gears and painted them with black and white so that the patterns they combined could change as the gears spin different angle. The spaces in 1 and 2 position either all black or all white and the position 2, 3, 4, and 5 would become a single color block.

 

With this idea in mind, I laser cut 6 small size gears to prove my concept. I just used 6 screws to screw them into a piece of soft block. Then I used sharpie to painted them as exactly color as I want. And it turned out to work well and it could change patterns as I spin to different angles. It meant I can move on to the next stage.

 

 

Next, I planned to design a back for the gears and a base to hold the back. Instead of making a simple large block as the base, I wanted to make something more aesthetically pleasing. Since there is a word called “gearhead”, which describes people who extremely love cars, I decided to make a human head and put the gears into the brain as an actual “gearhead”.

 

 

 

To make the low-fidelity prototype, I used the cardboard as material and cut the shape of head I downloaded online and modified with image trace. For this prototype, there are only two layers of the head: the back with the holes for sticks and the cover with a huge hole in shape of brain. Also, I used two different size circles and group them with two lines to make a crank so that I can spin the gears on the back. The gear in the middle are fixed with sticks while others are not. This prototype is not functioning because the gears are only single layer and can not spin with each other.

 

 

Later, as Dr. Wettergreen suggested, it will be more aesthetically pleasing if I fill the brain with gears. However, because of the irregular shape of brain, I can not fill more gears. So I decided to change the gear design. I changed the brain shape into a circle and made a circular gear with teeth both inside and outside. It would be powered by the four gears inside to spin and then power all the gears outside. The circular gear would not be fixed and the small gears inside lined up with 120 degree to each other. After making several prototype on gears, I found the best teeth numbers are 10 for the small gears and 32 and 40 for the inside and outside of the circular gear respectively.

 

Thus, I moved into the final prototype making. I made the design into different layers: base of the back, cover of back, gears, crank and base.

 

Also, the final design is three layers and would have a acrylic cover for the brain to prevent gears falling out. After cutting all the pieces, I used the super glue to stick the three layers together. I used the dremel to cut the stickers because I need it to be very short and precise. Then I glue the stickers to the base of the back. I also used the sanding machine to sand down the nose a little bit so that it can have a stronger 3-D feeling.

 

After these, I painted the whole head in read with brush. Also, I spray painted the background of brain in blue and the gears in white. For the whole base of it, I used three layers of wood and cut a rectangular hole in the middle to put the neck in and super glue them together.

The final prototype looks like this:

And here is the video of it moving: