Kinetic Construction Kit
Computer-Controlled Cutting Project
Overview
For this week's assignment, I will make a reconfigurable kinetic construction kit inspired by the mechanical systems used in film projection.
As part of MIT's Lecture Series Committee (a film/cinema technology club), I've worked with 35mm film projectors and overtime, I just became obsessed.
They're full of elegant mechanical motion, and building one seemed like a great way to explore different concepts like flexures for bending and adding engravings.
As I developed the idea, some of the components started reminding me of other mechanisms (film reels → ferris wheels/zoetropes, projector head → kaleidoscope), so the project naturally expanded into a reconfigurable kinetic kit instead of a single device.
This project let me experiment with parametric CAD, press-fit design, gears and sprockets, and flexure-based curved parts, while also building a small system of laser-cut components that can assemble into multiple mechanisms.
Design
I began by sketching the film projector, kaleidoscope, ferris wheel, and zoetrope concepts by hand to identify the main parts each mechanism needed and to see where components could overlap. This helped me break everything down into a set of reusable elements, for example, curved flexure pieces, gears, connector plates. These sketches guided the parametric features that I later CAD-designed in SolidWorks.
