Thanks to Phillip Dupree for sending in his project – nice work! Check out more info here.
“Personal Statements” is an annual event put on by the Stanford Graduate Design Program. Each second-year creates a piece that in some ways exemplifies them as a designer. I created a large kinetic sculpture – inspired by an ornithopter – controlled by a wearable vambrace. It was a melding of the old age of exploration, evinced by the Da Vincian ornithopter, and the excitement of future technology, demonstrated by the wireless gestural control. This project – named Flight – was my greatest challenge to date.
Flight Itself.
“Flight” is the name of the overall project and the kinetic sculpture mechanism individually. Created out of a fusion of wood (oak, alder, birch) and metal (aluminum, steel), its maximum height is 8′, and its wingspan is 12′. The entire structure and mechanism was designed in Autodesk Fusion 360.
The Mechanism.
Flight is actuated by a linkage mechanism powered in turn by a chain-driven drive shaft. The source of movement is a large and powerful DC motor. A Texas Instruments Tiva Launchpad microcontroller functions as the brains of the sculpture, communicating with the vambrace and controlling the motor. As it turns out, creating giant actuated mechanisms single-handedly is incredibly challenging. The stories could go on for a while, but all’s well that ends well.
Featured Adafruit Product!
Adafruit 9-DOF Absolute Orientation IMU Fusion Breakout – BNO055: If you’ve ever ordered and wire up a 9-DOF sensor, chances are you’ve also realized the challenge of turning the sensor data from an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer into actual “3D space orientation”! Orientation is a hard problem to solve. The sensor fusion algorithms (the secret sauce that blends accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope data into stable three-axis orientation output) can be mind-numbingly difficult to get right and implement on low cost real time systems. Read more.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!