mechanical and machine design
overview group project
In this week short before the final project we did a group-assignment in machine building; Our group (CBA/East) decided to build an automated light pencil, whereas to see the beauty of its art you need either a good memory or a time integrating device such as a camera. So we could call it e.g. “a painting slowly with light-machine”.
We met before the tutorial with Nadya and James for our intro session; a group consisting of primarily Media Lab people soon focused on a combination of technology and art; so our machine should be an artist but should also be able doing something hard for a human to perform; using light was the next step, and a laser was selected as light source in favor to an LED.
Since the group task was to build a machine supported by the modular stages concept driven by the pyGestalt virtual machine network, some frame parameters were given - two stages driven by stepper motors, a large one 1 square feet operating area but comparatively slowly. So we decided for the following concept: A control mechanism pilots a laser beam on a canvas, and a digital camera with long exposure time records the light path.
Since we wanted to use the XY-gantries, we decided to realize the angle dependency by a spherical mirror. It appeared also more promising to move the mirror instead of the laser, so the laser gets fixed, and the spherical mirror is moved perpendicular to the incident laser beam. In the following the individual sub-groups summarize their tasks.
my tasks
- idea generation (impulse for optical concept: using a spherical mirror, fix the laser and moving the mirror)
- board milling and stuffing (together with Chikara I - we had a back-up board)
- laser mechanical group (with Chikara I and Amanda G); tasks: laser fixation, spherical mirror, mirror fixation
- documentation of laser-mechanical group
- writing the group page intro
For further details please refer to CBA-group project