Fractured Perspective Final Documentation Video

Here is a video that Kayleigh complied to document our piece:

Video of Our Final Project

Here is a video of the whole thing working:



Some up close shots:









A little look "under the hood":

Mounted on the Wall for Arts + Tech Night!

Here is the final product hung on the wall:

Some more up close glamour shots in the dark:

Here is the plaque we came up with half an hour before the show. We liked it because you can't read it very well, and have to get at the right angle to be able to read what it says. This was the original intention of our piece.

More Assembly

Here are the servos mounted using those printed brackets and powering the black gear train:

 The second gear train was not so easy. For some reason the gears were not in sync and there was too much resistance for the servos to be able to turn them. After some troubleshooting we ended up removing one of the black gears, so there are two gears on the front side which simply don't turn.

Mounting it in our frame: 

We stained some lovely pine wood to give a nice frame to our project.

Back

Front

The LED strips are mounted around the top and sides of the box.

We also designed a backplate with a box for our electronics to contain all our components:

Here are the new RGB LED strips that Bryan gave us to use:

They are very bright and do a great job :)

Brackets Being 3D Printed

Here is one of our brackets being printed. They are designed to hold a servo to the back of the piece.

Mounting Gears n Such

Here we are mounting the gears:

 We had a lot of trouble with the gears because we realized that the organic gears on the top cannot touch each other at all. When they do the whole gear train gets locked up. We resolved this by having two heights to the top gears and alternating them so that they appear to move "magically". The black gears are not really visible when we light the piece from the sides.

Lighting

So we were trying to decide how to light the project. It is kinda hard to decide how to do it without seeing everything fully assembled. this is what we tried first. We wired a bunch of LEDs to strips that will sit in a frame around the outside edge of the piece.

Here is a video when we did a little test run with this method:

Here is the shield we designed that excluded the rotary encoders. We also had to plan for our RGB LED strips that we decided to use instead of the myriad of LEDs we were using before:

Here is the computer design:

We laser cut the protective coating off of this copper coated circuit board stuff:

Then we put it in the acid bath to remove the copper between the traces:

final product:

with everything soldered to it:

Arduino Shield Fabrication

Here is the first shield that we made. We ended up having to scrap it and make another because we were  originally planning on using full rotation servos and rotary encoders to track the position of the gear train, but we ended up having to go to regular servos.

Milled Background Image and Gear Image

We finished milling the backplate.

And here is the image that the gears will be cut from. This will overlay the background image:

Here are the gears after they have been laser cut from the tree image:

Final Image

Here is the final image:

 This will be milled on the backplate:

 This will be milled onto plexi-glass and the gears will be cut out of it:

How the gears will be cut:

The secondary backplate that has the part of the image not contained by the gears:

Troubles with Imaginary Gears

So the issues we had with the gears was not only a matter of spacing, but also a matter of the program not being precise enough. While imaginary gears are possible to make, the ones that we were using from Gearotic do not actually work when cut from plexi-glass. So in order to still use the organic gears we decided to tether them to working gears behind them.

 

In order to allow the secondary tether to move, a track needs to be cut. This means that we cannot use full rotation servos, as they will not be able to complete a full turn. 

Laser Cutter

Here is a cool vid of the laser cutter cutting out the new gears we are trying:

The Evolution of the Image

After the last attempt we did with milling we noticed that the image of the city wasn't super apparent what the image was at first. The milled effect drew people in more than the specific image. So we were exploring other possibilities with images that could be more ambiguous, like sky, water or trees. Here are some of the images I looked at for research:

As I was researching and looking at these images I was thinking that it would be nice to have something hidden in the trees, like and image:

I pulled some inspiration from this image:

....and started painting:

This is in progress, eventually there will be more trees and I will warp and align the branches to reveal some sort of image.

This will be really cool because even when the gears are not aligned people will be able to tell that they are trees, but until they align the secondary image will be hidden.