15. Mechanical design¶
This week we had to design a machine that includes mechanism+actuation+automation+application Our group decided to design a kinetic window, i.e. a window that can be opened and closed with a gear mechanism, which will be moved manually, but then automated with a servomotor and controlled by Arduino.
On the website of FabLab ESAN, which is our node, you can find the complete project.
Personal Contribution¶
My personal contribution to the group project is the following:
As an architect I am interested in designing kinetic architecture, therefore the inspiration for this work started by reviewing the Pixel Facade designed by Matthias Danzmayr which is documented on his website.
I started by doing some tests on how the pixels or squares of the window should look and how the rotation could be used to generate colour effects.
Then I started to define how the pixels should be held to work best.
Once the idea was well defined, I went on to design the window in Autocad. The design of the gears was the most complicated part. It helped a lot to have the example of the Pixel Facade.
We decided to use 4mm acrylic to make the gears and do some tests of their operation manually.
We also used 15mm MDF for the window frame.
With the help of the cutting plotter, we cut the self-adhesive vinyl to line the pixels.
