Gears & Gadgets work at Mass Art

    I might of gotten a little ahead of myself for this first assignment, but I was immediately enamoured with the kinetic principles and wanted to see what might be possible.  The sculpture was supposed to have more 'spines', in an attempt to create an undulating motion similar to that of a sea slug swimming, but unfortunately the MassArt studios were shutdown due to Covid before I could laser cut the rest of the pieces.  The motor was procured from an old microwave. 

    You could adjust the rotation of the top side gears to create different motions, the one recorded was one of the movements I found most interesting.  You essentailly have two different waves playing off each other, the outer rotations moving twice as fast as the center one, and each with a different wavelength.  I didn't quite create the rippling at the edges that I'd wanted, I think partially due to the rigidness of the spine's 'wings'.  If I was to explore this concept further I would likely try different materials for the wing pieces that had more flexibility.

    To get familair with Arduino and simple circuitry I created a digital version of 'Mastermind', a game I'd recently played with my kids.  In the game one player creates a secret code and the other player gradually deduces the code by making guesses and analyzing the degree of correctness of each guess.

    For the digital version I set up the circuits and devised a basic game loop.  If a choice is the right color and is in the correct position the game responds with a flash of green, if the secret code contains that choice's color but it is not in the correct order then it responds with blue.  If the code does not contain the choice color at all it flashes red.