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A Wall Sculpture for Swedish House Mafia

When the team from ScotiaBank Arena (In Toronto) reached out to me to make a gift they could present to Swedish House Mafia, my mind immediately went to smoke machines and lights.  Inspired by the groups signature three circle logo, I decided to build a wall mounted sculpture, backlit with RGB LEDs, that had an internal smoke machine that would blow smoke from behind the centre circles.  Of course, this being a JBV Creative Project, I had to add some moving parts to it that use gears, motors and electronics; and an Arduino to control the whole thing. This is the result of 20 days of work on Solidworks, over 100 hours of 3D printing, and lots of fun experimentation. Here are the features...

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The 10K Celebration Machine

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. ...

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The Robot Head Project - 2 Degree of Freedom Gimbal

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...

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Flingbot

Recounting the design and engineering process behind Flingbot, possibly the World's First Paint Flinging Robotic Catapult.

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