Project 2 Part 1: Sketches and Initial Design

For Project 2, we had to make an automata, a motor-powered mechanical device that does some kind of movement. When I saw the dimensions of the wooden box in the example project, I immediately thought of a fishing dock. My family lives near the Chesapeake Bay, and we have family friends who have a dock behind their house, and they have crab pots hanging off the side of their dock. I decided to try to create a movement with my mechanism that would look like a person lifting a crab pot up and having it fall back down. 


Here are some of my sketches brainstorming the look and mechanics of the automata. I was thinking about how I could maybe use a belt or a cam to create the motion, but the hard part is that the box needs to move in the opposite direction to the motion. 


I was also thinking about ways I could get the figure's arms to move with the rope to make it look more like he was pulling it, but this was a not a huge priority. Originally, my plan also involved 3D printing a life-size blue crab to be crawling up the dock behind the man, and have it snapping its claw as another aspect of the motion. This didn't make it into the final piece, unfortunately. 


Below is a sketch by Abhishek, one of my professors, when we were brainstorming how the mechanism could work. We decided something more like a pinwheel would work better than a cam or belt.



I also prototyped the mechanism in cardboard. The main functionality is that the shaft rotates and a circular cam rotates with it. The cam has one pin or arm that pushes down on the platform that the rope is attached to. This pulls the rope down and the weight on the other end (which is hanging off the edge of the dock) is pulled up. When the cam has completed half its rotation it will lose contact with the platform and the weight on the far end will fall down and the rope will go down (platform will go up). The main takeaway from this prototype was that securing the platform with the rope would be important. It needed to move freely only in the up and down direction. 








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