This project was inspired by the movie classic Studio Ghibli Movie, Spirited Away. The idea was to recreate the dragon from the movie in all of his glory by using a series of cams to move the body in a wave pattern. After making a few initialsketches, I moved on to CADing the parts that were needed for the project.

The CAD was fairly straight forward. I made each body segment in three pieces, two sides and one central part. This would allow me to have pins be inserted into the ends of the segments to connect each of the parts together. Similar to a chain, each body segment would be connected but still free to move in two axis.

Once I finished the CAD, I moved on to making my first prototype. Unfortunately, I was unable to use cardboard for this part so I had to jump straight into using wood. While this did cause a few challenges for me, I was able to create my first prototype fairly quickly.

I noticed that my choice of cam dimensions was way to small for the movement that I wanted to create, moreover, the cam followers were always falling off of the cams. To combat this, I made a series of spacers to keep the cams in place, increased cam size, and made a small guide to help the followers to stay in place.

With these changes, I also made a handle out of aluminum using the plasma cutter and a vinyl panel for the “sky” of my project as well.

 

In the end, this was a difficult but fun challenge. I learned a lot about how to better utilize the tools in the OEDK, the laser engraver, and how to design a large scale mechanical project!

Cost Break Down:

Plywood sheets – $1.67 per sheet (Amazon) x3 = $5.91

Vinyl – $0.73 per foot (Amazon) for ~1 ft = $0.80

Aluminum – $0.10 per sqr.in. ~ 1in = $0.12

Total: $6.83