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Software and Hardware Used
Google SketchUp
Involute Gears Plugin
YouTube
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Computer
Aided-Design
Kinetic Sign Model and
Animation: To view the animation the click
image below
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To generate a
3D model of the kinetic sign I utilized
Google SketchUp, in which I have a fair
amount of experience. I chose
use work with SketchUp because the software
is free and very user friendly; which makes
this an ideal software to use in a high
school classroom because my students will be
able to download it at home and can easily
work on projects outside of the
classroom. The design of the sign was
relatively straight forward with the only
catch being the construction of the gears,
for this I turned to a free plugin called
Involute Gears. This plugin allowed me
to construct the gear train with relative
easy, I simply had to input the number of
gears and gear radius for each gear.
After the basic design was complete I
realized that it was very important to
correctly place the gear mount holes in the
sign backing. To complete this task I
first positioned the mount hole of the drive
gear. Next, to determine the correct
location of the next gear, which I will call
the idler gear, I first created a circle
with total radius equal to the sum radius of
the driver and idler gears, with its center
at the same location as the driver gear. I
then measured the angle at which the idler
gear's center was compared to a horizontal
line passing through the driver
radius. Finally I used this angle to
mark the correct location, on the circle, of
were the gear mount hole for the first idler
gear should be located. I then
repeated this task for the remaining gears.
The other structures were modeled by me
except for the flowers and car, which I
retrieved from the 3D Warehouse found in
SketchUp. Once the flowers and car
were imported I needed to modify them to fit
the sign. The modifications made to
the flowers entailed removing the vase they
came in, shortening the stems, rearranging
them, and adding a mounting bracket to the
bottom so a rod can be connected from them
to the lever, which will make them
move. The modifications made to the
car included altering the wheels so they
were connected to the body, slicing the car
in half, adding a mounting bracket to the
back of the car, and adding a second
mounting bracket to the grill so a rod can
be connected from a gear to the car to make
it move.
The largest drawback of using SketchUp is
the amount of work needed to make revisions,
in some cases I found it easier to
reconstruct an object rather than modify it,
which could take a fair amount of time if
the object is complex.
The resulting model can be seen in the
animation above, which was created in
Sketchup and uploaded to YouTube.
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