Get Your Move On!
In
Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists,
you'll learn how to successfully build moving mechanisms through
non-technical explanations, examples, and do-it-yourself projects--from
kinetic art installations to creative toys to energy-harvesting devices.
Photographs, illustrations, screen shots, and images of 3D models are
included for each project.
This unique resource emphasizes using off-the-shelf components,
readily available materials, and accessible fabrication techniques.
Simple projects give you hands-on practice applying the skills covered
in each chapter, and more complex projects at the end of the book
incorporate topics from multiple chapters. Turn your imaginative ideas
into reality with help from this practical, inventive guide.
Discover how to:
- Find and select materials
- Fasten and join parts
- Measure force, friction, and torque
- Understand mechanical and electrical power, work, and energy
- Create and control motion
- Work with bearings, couplers, gears, screws, and springs
- Combine simple meachines for work and fun
Projects include:
- Rube Goldberg breakfast machine
- Mousetrap powered car
- DIY motor with magnet wire
- Motor direction and speed control
- Designing and fabricating spur gears
- Animated creations in paper
- An interactive rotating platform
- Small vertical axis wind turbine
- SADbot: the seasonally affected drawing robot
Table of contents
1 Introduction to Mechanisms and Machines
2 Materials: How to Choose and Where to Find Them
3 Screw It or Glue It: Fastening and Joining Parts
4 Forces, Friction and Torque (Oh My)
5 Mechanical and Electrical Power, Work, and Energy
6 Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Motor: Options for Creating and Controlling Motion
7 The Guts: Bearings, Couplers, Gears, Screws, and Springs
8 Combining Simple Machines for Work and Fun
9 Making Things and Getting Things Made
10 Projects
Appendix: BreadBoard Power and Arduino Primer
Index
Biographical note
Dustyn Roberts is a mechanical engineer, teacher, author, and
perpetual student. She founded a consultancy, Dustyn Robots
(www.dustynrobots.com), and developed a course for NYU's Interactive
Telecommunications Program (ITP) called Mechanisms and Things That Move.
Dustyn holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon
University, an MS in Biomechanics from the University of Delaware, and
is working on a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at NYU-Poly.
Preview Chapter 1
