Crafting Material Interfaces

Actuators Project

Thermochromic Felted Fabric with Steel.

Dena Molnar & Nicole Tariverdian

Self-generated Lantern

The flexinol became loose after testing for a couple of times, which worked not as well as before. Here is the video. Testing self-folded paper    

Ice Melting

Here is our presentation slides, which include the images: Heat actuator Water Crystallization SMALL Water droplets were frozen at -78C for 10-30 minutes, before being imaged under 625x microscope.  Some water droplets were subjected to negative pressure for the freezing process (.5 and .33 atm respectively), and their crystal size compared with 1atm frozen water.  [...]

Super Slow-Moving Paper

The idea, here, was to come up with some interesting paper-mechanisms and actuate them using flexinol. The title might give you some indication of how well that all came off. The folding went reasonably well. This is a miura fold, a kind of square tessellation. It’s very easy to do, and folds down flat. All of [...]

Actuators Project

Due: 3pm, Tuesday, November 29, 2011 See student posts here Working either individually or in a small group (2-3 people), you will experiment with material actuators in a hands-on project. For Tuesday’s class you should prepare a 5-10 minute presentation and a blog post that documents your project. Your presentation and blog post should include: [...]

Giving You The Finger, or How to Make a Homemade Small-Footprint Jamming Device (using Fluids instead of Air)

Having done research on soft robotics actuated by air, I wanted to create a simple device that will allow me to test and play with jamming with various fluid instead of air. I was  inspired by the Japanese soft robotics hand that we showed last week. The voiceover and subtitles explains how this works, where [...]

Crouching Beaver Hidden Institute

Overview I wanted to experiment with the thermochromatic ink that Leah showed us last week.  Just a reminder: thermo  = heat and chroma = colour.  It is an ink that changes its behavior when the temperature rises over a certain base level.  For example:                       [...]

Elastic Pneu-Actuator

by Daekwon Park & Woong Ki Sung Inspired by the hydro skeletons and muscular hydrostats in nature (e.g. elephant trunk, starfish, octopus arm, etc.), the kinematics are based on the combination of elastic material body actuator and pneumatic pressure feedback system. [Module and Power Source Feedback Loop] [Kinetic Study Process Sketches] [Table of Kinetic types, [...]