Kinetic Tech Art (and stuff)

     Imagine a little nest with a baby bird in it flitting around anxious for mom to come and drop a worm. This is a really cleaver use of a magnet.

    Attach the magnet to the shaft of a toy motor with some epoxy and then attach a flat head screw to the magnet. Try to keep the screw straight with the motor shaft. You could use a toy gear motor if you don’t want it to flip around so fast. Mount the motor on a base and point it at an angle towards the top of a rod which is also mounted in the base. Now I just made a bird as an example. There are lots of things you could have bob around at the top of the rod. Make some kind of pivot joint at the top of the rod and then wind a steal wire all around from that point down to the motor.

My explanation won’t do it justice. You’ll just have to see the video.

    Here’s another easy way to do something fun. And I know my friend Tab really likes noise. Take a toy motor and attach a short wire across the shaft like a “T”.  You could use glue or tape or here I used a peice of plastic rod. Then bend loops on both ends of the wire. Throught those loops make rings of wire that dangle like chain links. So as the motor spins the links swing out.

               Now the fun part. Mount the motor into some foam plastic. Then around the motor you can put steal or aluminum rods or tubing that will have jingle sound when the motor spins. Or you could use wood or plastic that will clatter.      Click this picture to see the movie.

    When you need to do a lot of pushing and pulling use a motor and a screw.  The tricky part is attaching the screw to the motor so that it doesn’t wobble too much but sometimes that can be a good thing. Here we have a butterfly made of red craft foam sheet suspended three wires. A wire attached to each wing and one in the middle. The middle wire is connected to a nut on the screw that goes up and down as the motor turns forward and backward.

Click the picture below to see it work. Just imagine a whole flock of these.

                     Here’s a simple fun idea for a kinetic art. Take some wire and wind it around a post or a cone or any shape. Then mount the bottom to a base and attach a small electric motor to the top. craft some sort of flower and hook it to the motor shaft off center, so it will wobble when it turns. Connect a bettery to the motor lead wires and have fun.

Its really fun. Click the picture to watch the video.

I know it sounds awful in this day and age to be using slaves but Logochips don’t really mind that much. There are a couple of groups that are considering multiple Logochips and here is a suggestion of how that can be done.  You can do something really easy by using the built in serial comm ports (portc 6 and portc 7). Here’s a brief schematic.

The program that goes in the master is slightly different than the program in the slaves in that the slaves have to keep their mouths shout until spoken to by the master otherwise the master won’t know which slave is doing the talking. So here’s the Logochip software programs.

   Master:    Master1                   Slave: Slave1