Min Hwang: Duck Automaton

This is a simple automaton made out of lazer cutting and 3d printing. When turning the lever on the side, the components on the top creates a mechanical movement shifting up and down.

The gear part of the automaton was made with three layers of acrylic plates cut in circle with a hole that is slightly away from the center. This asymmetry is the part that produces different movement for each components. 6 of the gears are placed on a pole at different position. As the pole rotate, the gears rotate in sync, but since the starting position was different, it will allow the components which is placed on top of the gear to make a wave like movment. The gears and the box were made from solidworks and then lazer cut. The pole was bought from the art store.

The comonents on the top is made with differnet techniques. The five ducks are from a previous assignment, where I generated a stl file using a python file. I modified the python file such that I can scale ducks easily.

The wooden piece, which is a engraving of an image of Link, the protagonist of the game 'The Legend of Zelda', was made using the Rabbit lazer cutter. I first drew the image, converted into 1-bit bitmap image, and then generated the outline of the image (dxf) using splines in solidworks. Then I engraved the image on a piece of wood, carefully flipped it so that I could have same but flipped image on the other side of the wood too.

Here is the link to the video of final product:

https://youtu.be/C0ysqFb35dE