Using engineering to create a completely over-engineered machine to pop balloons and make a huge mess- all in the name of celebration! What better way to celebrate reaching a milestone in my social media career than to create this silly, over engineered machine with the sole purpose of popping balloons filled with confetti. As many projects do, the scope of this project grew. What started with the question, how can I pop balloons in a fun way, ended up as 4 engineered sub systems complete with servo motors, an Arduino controller, a 3d printed print-in-place chain (download will be available soon) and a hobby knife on a gantry slider system. The celebratory hands were just the icing on the cake. ...
I originally saw the mechanism for this project on Youtube. I wanted to create this in a fully 3d printable form because it's an interesting interactive mechanism. I also thought it would make for a fun kinetic sculpture! This video shows the engineering process behind RobBob the robot. In the animation, 1 motor controls the rotation of the head through the yellow shaft and bevel gear. The tilt of the head can be controlled by rotating both motors together. In my mechanical 3d printed version I used knobs instead of motors: You can download the printable STL files from here There is one design flaw, however, where if you only rotate the 'tilt' knob, the head will tilt and...
