Starting in on Including the Kitchen Sink!

Well, its official. I'm racing in the Peoples Sculpture Race in Cambridge, MA come June 2nd. Bonafide!

My trusty steed will be a piece entitled Including the Kitchen Sink!, of which the action is going to be signalling the message 'HELLO WORLD!' in binary via turning a teapot over the course of the race. The entirety of its kinetic action will be done via mechanical components (save making steam for dramatic effect) and powered by pushing the cart forward.

Including the Kitchen Sink! uses the 120° swivel position of a copper tea kettle to indicate a binary encoded message, which for its inaugural run is the classic 'HELLO WORLD!'.
As the sculpture is pushed forward the teapot turns between its left and right position, operating as a Boolean variable container (0 or 1). Over the course of the Peoples Sculpture Race's path the kettle displays 96 Boolean positions, enabling it to articulate a 12 byte character sequence, like HELLO WORLD! To mark the end of each character the tea kettle produces a small burst of steam causing the kettle to whistle.

All of the design was done in Fusion 360, which I've found to be wonderful, with a few resources from GrabCad (Listed Below) and using Matthias Wandel's Gear Generator.

A few WIP shots...

The finished Renders...

And finally, a bit of motion...

This little ditty shows how the mechanism will move for the character 'H', the first in 'HELLO WORLD!'.

Full text of the proposal can be found [here, PDF]

Next up comes a bit more design, and then actually making it. I'm going to have to learn how to print PETG which is the next big challenge, but that should be fun.

Cheers,

Mac