Final proposal?

Progress!

Jess and I are rather satisfied with the direction where going, namely, our "box" chair.










So the premise of this proposal is basically a box which transforms into a chair. Building off of our preliminary concept, the armrests and the back of the chair come into action when a person sits on it. The downward motion of the "button" is connected to a rack and pinion system which then rotate a system of arms/links that will both elevate the armrests and rotate the back of the chair into their final positions.

The idea behind is that, as a box, it would be easier to store and could serve as an additional footstool, small coffee table, etc. We are still discussing ideas concerning whether it would lock into the chair position, the materials, possibilities for ergonomics, shapes, etc. Here are some rough ideas:

Concepts!

So after our brainstorming session, we thought of some ideas:





Firstly, a basic translation of pressure to rotation to linear motion again through linkages. Here, the basic idea is a armrest that will elevate up from below the level of this chair's seat. It will be triggered by the "seatee's" weight utilizing the rack and pinion to rotate one of the linkages to elevate said armrests.

Another,

















We went ahead and tried to apply it onto a larger scale, such as a facade. Here rotating members span horizontally which are then attached to linkages which will orient panels. Through varying the lengths and positions of these linkages, different movements and positions of these panels are possible. Again, we are just exploring possibilities. The last example you see here actually uses a scissor jack system however, in which long screws control the expansion/contraction of the associated linkage system.

...a bit delayed but..

I've finally gotten a hang of this blog stuff! Anyways, I'll follow suit and post my "found object"

I essentially found a "walking" bug. It's a mechanical walking bug toy (which belongs to my roommate by the way and is also nonfunctional at the moment). It uses a fixed linkage system between the legs allowing it to walk forward.















As you can see, there is only one motorized part of the legs, that is the rotating cylinder powering the middle leg which is connect to the other two legs. This connection allowed for this cycle of movement forward.

Gears and Software

After brainstorming ideas for things we could design with our combined mechanisms (rack and pinion and linkages) we started doing research on different types of linkages and came across this very cool video of a Watt's linkage:

We now have a really interesting concept for a chair that we want to design. I think we're actually going to end up cutting the Watt's linkage out of our chair for now (more drawings to follow) but we discovered the Mekanimo software from this video which is really cool. I also just got the Autodesk Inventor software last night, so I'm going to start playing with that and finally, Allen found a nifty plugin for SketchUp called sketchy physics which might come in handy too. So now we have options of how to figure out how everything is going to work with our gears and linkages!

Hello World!

Hi everyone! So Allen and I have been working hard over the weekend brainstorming and you'll see the product of that soon, but until then, here is some info on my chosen object for this little project! I got a fancy-shmancy ice cream scoop, and Allen will follow-up with his walking bug.


I had fun learning how to model in 3Ds Max to put this together, mostly because of the organic forms of the handles: