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.

Mounted Gears

We mounted the gears, but we had trouble because they aren't the perfect distance from each other.

Progress for Proof of Concept - Final Project

For our proof of concept for our final project we wanted to get a working gear train. We were experimenting with some non-traditional gears, and we have two different types we tried. Here is an in progress video of each:

 

 

They are not currently fully mounted, so we don't know if the difficulty in it working now is that they are just too loose or what.... we need to experiment further.