Here We Go. Will be further developed in the future.

Blood Sweat Tears

As we started to build our final prototype, we realized just how much work would be required to finish it.

 Not to mention the number of pieces we bent while adjusting the length of the most important touch to our kinetic sculpture.

It took a few hours to finally win the stubborn chain links.

Coming Soon!

Potentially Coming Soon: A Jellyfish Center

As we proceeded further into our bike-chain mechanism, we realized that our design still wasn’t organic enough. Also the middle felt incomplete so we started thinking about ideas to work it into our idea. In the end, we used fish line to imitate bouncy jellyfish limbs. However, if it distracts from the original amoeba aesthetic, we will abandon it as well.

Obstacles

The previous mechanism we used for ideation appeared very mechanical and inorganic when looking at other views besides the top. In order to solve that, we are considering the use of chains to mimic a jelly-like fluid movement. We still used the rack and pinion mechanism from before, however we decided to take a new approach as to what would be shown above the base.

Building Up from Previous Ideas

What we came up was a bike chain being pulled by the leg gears that can extend and retract. Like our first initial idea of having a shaft pull at fabric, gears pull on the chains. We are considering to have one gear drive these chains. *The chain was also extremely challenging to make on Solidworks. (Thanks Ronald!)

Through prototypes in this direction, we decided to pursue in working with a bike chain sculpture. To us, we found aesthetic appeal in a moving chain that changes accordingly to our inputs. But with using this, we have to use a strong material for our gears so it doesn't break or wear out easily.

Before building our physical prototype, we had many things to consider problems that may occur. One was that we weren't sure how our motors would control each individual leg as needed. We thought about multiple solutions like having elastic bands to pull back the leg if another was stretched. In the end, we settled on controlling each limb's movement using one universal rotating motor that drives all the smaller gears.

About Our Amoeba Kinetic Sculpture

Amoeba is a kinetic structure that represents the electricity consumption in a household. It is to give users a good sense of energy consumption levels by having them observe the outstretching movements and the light changes on the sculpture. This design can be further develop versatility by increasing or decreasing the number of arms with respect to the number of areas and things which energy consumption interests users. For example, having it indicate the electrical consumption of kitchen appliances, and further abstracting different usage levels of different buildings. 

Previous Mechanisms We Had Thought About

The first method we thought up was that a stretchy fabric would be pulled by the shafts connecting to them. As the disc is rotating, its pin pulls the slider joint outwards away from the centre of the entire sculpture. This in turn drives the shaft to stretch the fabric of the legs. The difficult part of this idea is to find a stretch material to use that would resemble an amoeba's shape. We considered many of these including spandex, nylon, and moda. However, none of them worked out as we tested them out in our prototyping sessions.

Another method we thought up was that instead of a stretchy fabric being pulled, three plates are drawn in and out with binary links that are attached to a rack and pinion mechanism. As one is looking from the top view, it gives off the illusion that the legs are being stretched towards a particular room when instead, it is just flattening. We got this idea from looking at how chain mail worked.

 

First rendered prototype from SolidWorks

Research and Mechanism

The Arabesque by Peter William Holden serves as inspiration for our final Amoeba project.

Holden combines programming with mechanical elements to create mandala-like installations for cinematography. Compressed air tubes are used to pump air into pistons that move the artificial limbs and joints. By controlling the timing and amount/volume of air released into the pistons, different parts of the joint are able to work asynchronously to show choreography in the kinetic sculpture.The geometric lines and choreographic movements gave us direction on how we would make our mechanisms movement as real and organic as possible.