Going With The Flow: Whimsical Tulip Meadow

• Chloe Hsieh

Hello, world! Chloe and Carlisa here :3 

Chloe: This sure was a journey of ups and downs. Maybe we should’ve made a roller coaster model instead. In any case, despite (or maybe because of!) the bumps along the road, we poured our hearts into this project and learned so much along the way. 

We started off absolutely bursting with inspiration, quite literally filling up an entire Google Doc with potential ideas. In the end, we came together and agreed that we wanted a project full of whimsy and joy that we could personalize to our heart’s content. And so begins our foray into constructing a tulip meadow scene with coordinated moving parts.

The first step was to decide on which mechanisms we wanted to incorporate into our project. The windmill was fairly simple, as we decided the easiest way was to go with the classic pulley system (mechanical movement #1). However, there was some debate on which mechanisms to use for the river and the tulip movements. We figured a tread motion might be the best way to imitate a running river, but we weren’t sure how to translate the idea into real life. We were also caught between two different options for the tulips–one with a churning motion in small loops, and the other with a simple seesaw. To work out these challenges, Carlisa and I spent the weekend learning how to use CAD to visualize each mechanism. We ended up choosing the tulip seesaw for simplicity (modeled after mechanical movement #6), and sought inspiration from mechanical movement #39 for the river belt. 

From here, we combined all these parts into one cohesive plan, and Beck (hello third teammate!) started mapping out the applications and how they would fit together. The low-fidelity prototype started off great, and laser cutting the cardboard was a breeze, but the pieces were quite stubborn and did not get along well (hello foreshadowing). The cardboard (nor I) responded well to pressure, and by the time we finished putting it together, some of the pieces were looking rather flat. The mechanisms barely worked, but I chalked this up to the flimsy material. The river lattice was too rigid to fold into a proper belt (unless forced), the tulip seesaw didn’t have enough room to rock, and the band of the windmill pulley kept slipping off the gear. We planned to fix this by trying out a different lattice structure, cutting out bigger holes for the seesaw, and sandwiching the gears. On to the next iteration! 

We had high hopes for the medium-fidelity prototype. Excited by the prospect of using sturdier material, yours truly was convinced that this was when everything would magically fix itself. Yours truly was disappointed (but not surprised). The only thing we fixed in this iteration was adding the gear sandwich to stop the pulley band from slipping. The larger holes should have allowed the tulip seesaw to rock, but they just ended up staying on one side. We attempted multiple iterations of the river lattice structure itself, but nothing came close to the euphoria of abandoning all pretense and simply bending cardboard to our will (you never know what you have until you lose it). Most unfortunately, new issues cropped up. While the mechanisms now worked independently (yay!), they did not have the capacity to play nice and work together (boo!). We quickly figured out that the pieces were fastened too tightly in almost every place where there was movement and resolved to space things out a little. 

Carlisa: For our high fidelity, we were confident we wanted to begin our transition from cardboard to wood, which was straightforward, given that we already had the files from the laser cutting. One thing I don’t think that we took into consideration, however, was the difference in kerf between our two materials. Either way, we cut out and began assembling our final vision, and quickly realized that many things were flawed in the wooden version.

The windmill worked well; however, initially, we still used cardboard blades to test it, so it gave us an inaccurate expectation of what the pulley system could move. In our final iteration, it was very difficult to get the blade system to move for a moment without manually touching it.

For the tulips, we continued to have the same issue we had in the low fidelity, that our tulips just stayed on one side, depending on the direction the main axis was turned. To remedy that, we had to add equal waterjetted rectangles of metal to each side as weights to actually achieve the seesaw effect.

For the river, we had quickly figured out that the wood was nowhere near as bendable as the cardboard, and so we had to go back to the drawing board for ways to get the river effect. What we did to remedy this was to laser cut dozens of thin wooden strips the width of the river. We glued them onto a round piece of fabric close together at the top to get the cascading look and incrementally at the bottom to get the gear effect.

Also, our original train wheel design with 4 gears was not practical for the small space, especially as we realized that the main center gear was powerful enough to move everything, and that the other gears were moreso just needed for support so we drilled holes into the front wall, added two axels for the support gears and that was the mechanisms all figured out.

For our post-processing steps, we painted the sides of the boxes in green and covered them with flowers, we painted the river blue and added dots of colour as tulip petals also. Similarly, we painted the tulips in different colours and kept all the stems green.

The last things we did were adding the vinyl sticker, our metal pieces, which were our water jetted blades, to the front, which we sand blasted and spray painted, as well as our flower-shaped handle to operate the whole box. 

Chloe: Overall, I think this was quite the educational experience for us all. We learned a lot about communication, following through on commitments, and setting meaningful priorities. Beyond that, I learned that things don’t always work out the way you want them to, even when you put in all the time and effort in the world. And that’s okay. It’s better to step back and take the extra time to make sure you end up with something you’re proud of, instead of rushing through to get it done. At the end of the day, I’m proud of myself and Carlisa for doing all that we could and finishing strong.

How much did this project cost?

TOTAL: $2,483.56

deciding on the mechanisms

sketch

aesthetic visualization

cutting out pieces

assembling low-fidelity prototype

Low-Fidelity Prototype.
Materials: Laser-cut cardboard, wooden dowels, and foam ball
Main issues to fix: Cardboard is too flimsy for mechanisms to work; river lattice not flexible enough; friction stops tulip seesaw from working

Medium-Fidelity Prototype.
Materials: Laser-cut wood, wooden dowels, fabric, cardboard (instead of metal because the waterjet was down)
Fixed from last prototype: issues caused by flimsy cardboard; replaced river lattice
Main issues to fix: Mechanisms work independently but not together; fixings are too tight and get jammed after a few revolutions

Final/High-Fidelity Prototype.
Materials: Laser-cut wood, wooden dowels, fabric, metal,
paint
Fixed from last prototype:
Widened gaps and holes,
allowing room for mechanisms
to turn more freely
Future iterations: Fasten
mechanisms more securely;
possibly redesign tulips to be
less fragile

clean workspace!

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