Kinetic Sculpture
Design
The idea for my kinetic sculpture was to narrate a poem by the Yiddish poet A. Lutzky, titled "A Piece of Paper Wants to Commit Suicide." It goes like this:
a piece of paper tired of life,
found its way to some rails
and waited for the train.
when the train steamed in
the piece of paper tre m ble d at its might
took a
leap
and left with terrible joy
I envisioned a train approaching via a belt, powered by a DC motor. The same motor would rotate gears and cams which were, in turn, connected by wires to a typewritten copy of the poem, causing it to flutter, dance, and toss itself in front of the belt-driven train. The cams would then cyclically return to their start position and the train would loop through a "tunnel" to reappear at its start position. I made some sketches and typed up the poem on thin onion skin paper.
With the help of this gear generator and this box generator, I laser cut this first prototype, mainly to experiment with how the whole thing might work.
Printing
I first printed the general body with a peg board to allow various gear configurations for experimentations. The belt was very rudimentary, composed of a piece of bicycle inertube the the train engine sewn to the belt. This did not work well at all—the inner tube was inclined to buckle and the engine thus inclined to lean right or left, rather than stand straight.
I drew beautiful rails for an immersive visual experience.
After experimentation, I "perfected" the gear layout, redesigned a simplified backboard with a mount for the motor, and printed some of the gears out of wood for durability.
I redesigned the belt from a strip of flat rubber and reinforced the section below the engine with construction paper and fixed the engine with a strip of sheetmetal.
Programming
I ran the motor via arduino and the power driver, reducing the voltage so as not to drive the gears to fast. It seems a bit more torque was necessary to power the belt, but the gears ran smoothly if a touch of pressure was relieved from the axle. The dancing paper idea was scrapped (too difficult to choreograph). The new idea was to simply tear the paper on arrival of the train by employing horizontal motion using strips of cardboard fixed to the gears. Because nothing ever worked in unison, not further coding was developed...