HW3: Automata

HW3: Automata

A sun seeking flower.

Some flowers rotate to face the sun. I thought I'd try to create one that did something like that. Mechanically, the flower would spin as its leaves bobbed back and forth. In the future, I could add a servo and photoresistor to have the flower actively seek the sun.

First Drafts

From the beginning, I figured that I could use a cam to get the leaves to bob. I originally considered using gears to make the leaves bob faster than the flower turned, but I soon realized that I could just use a cam with more edges to get a similar effect with fewer parts.

On To Illustrator

I tried to block our rough dimensions with Illustrator

As the cam mechanism became more concrete, I figured that a piece to hold the leaves and allow them to pivot would be needed, as shown by my second Illustrator draft. In this draft, some components were laid out facing the camera so as to see their shape instead of in the correct rotation.

The little circle on the each leaf creates a larger, rounded surface to pivot on. The green block is a hole in the piece that the circle pivots in.

On To Cutting

It was soon apparent that the flower pot wasn't going to assemble itself. I figured some glue and meshing teeth at the base would be the most geometrically appealing.

Assembling

I had a couple issues with the assembly. First, the legs of the leaves were sticking down a little too far. Turns out, since I had removed some material from the flowerpot walls to facilitate the tabs, the legs were now too long. Luckily a quick snap and they were back down to size.

The leaves bobbed but wouldn't quite stay in place. Since the cam was rotating, the followers on the leaves got a component of both the rotation and the translation. I couldn't quite figure out how to stop this, but in theory, making the legs a little thicker and adding a second set of slots to lock the legs to the axis would help.

The result