In August, I took my son to the Museum of Science in Boston. In the entryway is an amazing kinetic sculpture called "River Loom" by Reuben Margolin. The cool thing about this sculpture is that it moves many points on the "river" using only two motors. For Halloween, I made a simplified version of this mechanism that moves a colony of bats up and down.
I started by experimenting with pennies to figure out how the mechanism should work. Each penny was taped to a piece of string, and I ran each string through a small hole in a piece of cardboard to keep the pennies separated. Then I tied all the strings together above the cardboard. As I moved the common endpoint of the strings around above the cardboard, each penny moved up and down slightly differently. One interesting thing about this mechanism is that the motor only acts to move the pennies up. Gravity provides the force to move them down.
Once I had a small prototype, I realized I could use a linkage to move the endpoint of the strings around a much larger area. I bought a 40" by 60" piece of foamcore and mounted two motors and a lego linkage to the top. Below the foamcore, I attached each string to a small paper bat. Since the bats were very light, I weighted each one down with a penny.
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